Edible Food Find: Big Little Pies
Photos by Linda Campos
In 2023, Lauren Marinoff found herself unfulfilled in her consulting career. On a flight home from a work trip in Texas, she scrolled through the in-flight entertainment options and, guided by a love of baking she nurtured during the pandemic, landed on a 90-minute video about making the perfect pie crust. It was there, somewhere over the country at 35,000 feet, that the instructor offered a piece of wisdom Marinoff would never forget: Don’t waste your leftover dough—those scraps can become tarts of their own.
“I got home from this trip, I made my first good pie and I became obsessed with the idea of making little pies,” Marinoff says, realizing they tasted superior to full-sized pies. “The ratio of crust to fruit to topping is even better—you get everything all in one bite.”
She spent the next few months furiously making tiny pies in her equally tiny East Boston kitchen, honing her idea for a small-pie company. “You have cupcakes for cake, you have Munchkins for doughnuts, but you don’t really have the equivalent for pies,” she reasoned at the time.
Next, she perfected the classics—apple, blueberry, strawberry-rhubarb and sour cherry pies— before deciding to join Dorchester’s CommonWealth Kitchen. After three months of education as part of the organization’s business incubator program, she became fully licensed and permitted by May 2024. Thus Big Little Pies was born.
“The name was a little bit of an accident when I was brainstorming,” Marinoff admits. “I had this list of not-great names, and when I said ‘Big Little Pies,’ I thought ‘Why does that sound so good? Oh, because it sounds exactly like the book [Big Little Lies].’ It felt so catchy that I went with it.”
Big Little Pies first launched to the public at Somerville Porchfest, when a friend of a friend asked Marinoff to sell pies at their DJ set. “We sold out in an hour,” she says. “I was, like, ‘I think I might have something. I guess it’s time to leave my job.’” Soon after, she quit her consulting position to pursue baking full-time.
Her pies, which measure three and a half inches in diameter, have an all-butter crust and fillings made with real fruit; each one is baked by hand from scratch. The flavors she considers “the classics,” are still the best-selling, though she’s expanded to triple-berry, blackberry-peach, apple-blackberry, flutternutter, key lime and chocolate cream. Sour cherry, however, remains her personal favorite.
Now, Marinoff sells her pies at seasonal farmers markets in Greater Boston, in addition to doing catering and pop-up events. Yet no matter where they buy their pies, her customers tend to return for more. One in particular takes home five pies every week—a box of four plus an additional apple pie for the road. “I thought he was bringing them back to his family,” Marinoff recounts. “Then one week his kids came with him and they were, like, ‘Oh my god. We’ve heard so much about the pies. We’ve never had them!’”
She credits Big Little Pies’ early successes to what she learned at CommonWealth Kitchen. “It’s a really special community and, quite frankly, I don’t know that I would have been able to start without their backing and support.”
Marinoff’s goal is to eventually ship pies nationally, as well as open a storefront. Until then, she’ll keep cranking out little pies, all thanks to that in-flight video. “Inspiration,” she says, “comes in the most random of ways.”
This story appeared in the Summer 2026 issue.
