Celiac Awareness Month Follow Friday: The Maine Pie Co.
Celiac Awareness Month Follow Friday: The Maine Pie Co.
Every Friday, during Celiac Awareness Month, Gluten Free Therapeutics will be featuring a company from our home state of Maine. These companies are making delicious contributions to living gluten free and our loyal blog readers should know more about these companies. We started off talking about Power of 3 Seed Blends and last week we shone the GF spotlight on Bixby Bar.
In the third installment of our gluten free, Maine based, Follow Friday feature, we would like to bring your attention to Jill Miller and The Maine Pie Co.
Starting a year ago, Jill is baking only gluten-free pies, with flavors that change with what’s fresh and in season. Jill is both experienced as a baker and with celiac disease and gluten intolerance.
Jill had a bakery in Nyack, New York for 11 years and decided to move to Maine in 2000 with her husband and two young children.
She created Port Bakery in Kennebunk’s Lower Village (neighboring Kennebunkport is where Gluten Free Therapeutics calls home).
After a year a half, she sold the bakery, making the choice to devote her time to her two young children.
“I didn’t move to Maine to work all the time,” she explained.
Fast forward to 2013, Jill, with a daughter in college decided it was time to return to baking, once again in Kennebunkport. Her husband was diagnosed with celiac disease in his early 20s. Though not suffering with celiac disease, her children have shown symptoms of being sensitive to gluten with headaches and stomachaches.
In regards to her bakery, Jill thought, “Why not be exclusively gluten free?”
She used her extensive baking knowledge to translate her recipes to be gluten free and she said people have loved her pies. Customers with or without celiac disease and gluten sensitivities alike have taken to writing reviews on Facebook, raving about her pies. Even blogger, Gluten Free Boston Girl reviewed The Maine Pie Co. recently and raved about the crumb topping on the strawberry rhubarb and how the apple pie she shared with coworkers was gone within an hour of putting it out to share.
Recently, at the New England Food Show, The Maine Pie Co. was voted Best New Food Product.
At the end of March 2014, The Maine Pie Co. experienced growing pains and officially outgrew their space in Kennebunkport. Miller and The Maine Pie Co. moved to a bigger, strictly gluten free production facility in The North Dam Mill in Biddeford, Maine.
The Maine Pie Co.’s pies have been tested and certified gluten free by Katahdin Analytical.
Locally, Jill’s pies are available in Kennebunk at HB Provisions in the lower village and Cherie’s. You can also find pies at Lois’ Natural Marketplace in Scarborough and now available at Whole Foods in Portland. Her pies are available to order online here and ready to be picked up at her Biddeford location.
She sells her pies frozen and unbaked, so her customers can always have a fresh, gluten-free pie available at home. (Jill explains that if you call ahead to her Biddeford location, she would be happy to have a freshly baked pie ready for pickup.)
For spring, The Maine Pie Co. is offering seasonal flavors like strawberry rhubarb, threeberry and peach crumb in addition to standard flavors of wild blueberry and apple.
This original article is made possible by Gluten Free Therapeutics. Our mission is to educate, inform, and provide the most effective nutritional products possible to allow those with celiac disease and serious gluten intolerances to heal their bodies. CeliVites complete line of superior gluten free supplements includes multivitamin/multimineral supplements, iron supplements, and calcium supplements for people living with celiac disease. All CeliVites products are designed to help you heal, restore and rebuild your body, because going gluten free isn’t enough!
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