Ginger
A severe snowstorm was brewing in Northern Colorado when Ginger boarded a plane out of New York City, eager to get home to the mountains west of Boulder. Hers was the last flight to land in Denver that day.
“We followed the snowplow up to our home,” she remembers, “because that was the only way I could get there, and he [the driver] couldn’t get on our property because we got seven feet of snow that day. But I got out anyway because I thought, ‘Oh, this is no big deal. I’ll just walk to our house.’”
“I had no idea what it meant to walk in three or four feet of snow. I’m not a very tall person. I ended up having to abandon my purse and my briefcase and my luggage. I lost my shoes, and by the time I got to the house, I had almost lost my feet.”
Ginger had lived and worked all over the country: New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego—the list goes on. But she’d never lived at 8,000 feet above sea level. That day, about two years after moving to the Centennial State, she earned a “reverence for the drama of the mountains.”
Despite nearly losing her feet, Ginger loves Colorado, especially her and her husband’s current hometown, Fort Collins.
“This is our last location. The people are so friendly here, and I love the community. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to my [childhood] hometown, . . . Springdale, Arkansas. It’s a town that has billionaires and has a lot of people in need. It is multicultural. It’s agricultural, has a land grant university, and is a thriving entrepreneurial downtown community owned by locals, so . . . what you have is: giving, participation, a thriving economy, legacy businesses, and people who help each other.”
Growing up, Ginger learned the art of giving and engaging. Her parents threw themselves into bettering Springdale, through Jaycees (United States Junior Chamber), church, PTA, festivals, and more. No matter their financial circumstances, her mom was constantly packing and bringing food to families in need.
Now decades later, Ginger has woven her homegrown love and talents into her business: Ginger and Baker.
“We have a tagline that’s called: ‘History, Community, Creativity and Pie.’ . . . The community aspect, I think, is the most valuable.”
The business began as Ginger’s dream to run a pie shop, but it quickly turned into a multi-restaurant hub and event venue—complete with a pie-centric bakery, of course. Ginger and Baker owes its growth, in part, to its location: the Northern Colorado Feeders Supply building, constructed in 1910.
“One day, someone told me this old mill was for sale, and so we came and looked at it. I fell in love with the building—and that is not a good way to start a business!” Ginger exclaims, chuckling. “Because the building is on the National Register, which means it’s protected, and you can’t alter its exterior because of that. So we weren’t able to put the commercial kitchens in this old building. We had to build the adjacent building.”
Today, the mill and its glassy pie-shaped neighbor host a variety of events, from intimate parties in the wine cellar to boisterous camaraderie in the Teaching Kitchen. When people ask Ginger why pie is so important to her and her business, all sorts of answers flood her mind. They’re perhaps summed up best as: Pie connects.
“If I talk to you for a while, I bet you have a pie story,” she says. “Almost everyone, all over the world, has a pie story, because pie is present in every culture in the world, and often it’s associated with someone who loved you.”
“Pie feeds the community,” she adds. “I think it’s a wonderful metaphor for what we value, what we as humans value: that connection to the local seasonal world, that real food made by hand, that shareable moment.”
