How Little Susie’s is building a pie business one crust at a time

Daniel Martino didn’t set out to build an empire of pie shops. He just wanted somewhere to get coffee without leaving the neighborhood.

When he bought his home in Port Richmond in 2013, the closest coffee shop was an hour round trip, he said. “Selfishly, I thought, I can put a little coffee shop here.”

And what goes better with a cup of coffee than pie? He had a recipe he’d been baking for family get-togethers.

Seven years after Martino opened Little Susie’s Coffee & Pie in the building next door to his house, his modest idea has grown into four Philadelphia locations, with a fifth expected to open Friday at the former Pop’s Bun Shop in Bella Vista, a franchise headed to Milwaukee, and plans for additional shops in Fairmount and Northern Liberties. All his stores run from takeout windows, requiring little more than coffee stations and electric ovens.

Today, the company employs 28 people and turns out about 1,200 pies a day from a bakery occupying two cramped rooms in the corner rowhouse on Lehigh Avenue.

Martino, 46, who grew up in Northeast Philadelphia, has spent much of his working life around food. As a teenager, he worked at a swim club snack bar before taking a kitchen job at what is now Jefferson Torresdale Hospital.

After studying film at Temple University, he joined Public House Investments, which ran City Tap House, as a DJ before becoming the hospitality company’s creative director, designing menus, logos, ads, and marketing material.

When the property next door to his house became available, Martino said he used a home-equity line of credit to buy it before securing a Small Business Administration loan to renovate it.

By the time Little Susie’s opened in December 2019, he said, “I had maxed out every credit card I had. I even had to go to the bank, hat in hand, and sign a signature loan for the last $10,000 just to get it open.”

His shop offered a simple menu, little more than coffees and lattes and four kinds of pies. There was a counter for seating. The first day brought in about $180, and “it was the greatest day of my life,” Martino said.

Then the pandemic arrived. When COVID-19 restrictions shut down indoor dining, Little Susie’s shifted to window service. Customers called in orders, paid over the phone, and picked up coffee and pies outside. Even after restrictions were lifted, the shop never reopened indoors.

It wasn’t what Martino had imagined. His idea was ”Cheers with coffee — the neighbors and the mailman talking about the weather,” he said.

Instead, customers embraced the walk-up model and the seating at a picnic table beneath a maple tree. The pies especially quickly caught on. The signature is the crust. Rather than trimming away the excess dough, workers twist it around each pie by hand, creating what Martino calls “a fluffiness that the fork doesn’t provide — that flaky tenderness you want in a pie crust. The twist is its own special treat in and of itself.”

The pies, which are baked and not fried, are made with a simple crust of flour, butter, sugar, and salt. It’s a 48-hour process. Dough is mixed at the company’s Kensington location, where a 20-quart mixer runs nearly all day. The dough rests for 24 hours before it is brought to Port Richmond, where it is sheeted, filled, twisted, frozen, and delivered to the other stores to be baked to order.

Little Susie’s first menu included only blueberry, pork roll, apple, and mushroom Swiss fillings. Today, it offers about a dozen varieties, with eight available year-round and others rotating seasonally. “You can practically throw anything in this pie crust,” Martino said. “I haven’t been disappointed yet.”

Pork roll remains the top seller, followed by apple, and a sausage, egg, and cheese breakfast pie encrusted with everything bagel seasoning. Seasonal flavors have included ham and Brie, chocolate-covered strawberry, and Cajun crab and corn. None are gluten-free because of the shop’s limitations, he said.

Not every idea works. “We tried to make a cannoli pie, but the cream just melted right out,” he said.

Each shop sells 200 to 300 pies a day. The production kitchen now employs 11 bakers, who track production on a whiteboard nicknamed “the Pieble.” Each variety get its own knife mark on top; an inverted V, for example, denotes mushroom Swiss.

Lena Hurchick, who has worked at Little Susie’s for three years, said she enjoys “the competition of filling all the shops” and watching customers eat pies she helped make.

“Susie” was the name of the dog that belonged to the former owner of the building. “When we had the community meeting here, I said, ‘I’m thinking Little Susie’s,’ and people started crying,” he said.

Expansion has brought complications. A planned Fairmount location was nearly ready to open before the city determined that the property required zoning approval for food sales. “The city does not make it easy,” he said, adding that it will take months to get onto the zoning board’s calendar.

Even so, he expects the company to keep growing. He has a handshake deal for a spot in Northern Liberties. Milwaukee is planned as the first franchise — operated by a friend — while Martino has begun thinking about a larger bakery in Philadelphia.

“We’re basically bursting at the seams,” he said. “We’re probably going to need a 10,000-square-foot facility.”

He wants that growth to remain slow enough that the pies are still made fresh every day. “I don’t want to get too far away from making them every day, because then it just becomes some frozen-food empire,” he said.

Little Susie’s Coffee & Pies’ locations are at 2532 E. Lehigh Ave. in Port Richmond, Second and Chestnut Streets in Old City, 1772 N. Front St. in Kensington, and 1754 S. Chadwick St. in Point Breeze. A fifth, at 800 S. Ninth St. in Bella Vista, is due to open Friday. Hours are 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily.