Cordova woman helps Memphis bakery deliver ‘miracle' pie to Texas
The day before Thanksgiving, Muddy’s Bake Shop owner Kat Gordon was holding out for a holiday hero. An ordering mishap meant a customer in a small Texas town was unlikely to get the pumpkin pie she ordered from the Memphis bakery, Gordon wrote via Facebook.
“I totally messed up and somehow left a box off our mail order and now this sweet lady won’t get her pie in time,” Gordon said in the post, which hit Muddy’s Facebook page around 11 a.m. Nov. 21. “…I feel so bad and desperately want to figure this out (and I’ve learned when ya can’t do it alone, ask for help!)”
But thanks to that social media outreach and some creative, timely logistics, the pie from Memphis reached its intended destination of Bowie, Texas — 71⁄2hours away — in time for Thanksgiving.
Gordon said in an interview that she realized the morning of Nov. 21 that the pie, already a replacement since the original was left behind during a prior courier pickup, was a longshot to reach its final destination.
She put up posts on Muddy's Bake Shop's Facebook and Instagram accounts in hopes that someone traveling that way for Thanksgiving would see the post. The business luckily received an outpouring of support, along with suggestions and offerings from those wanting to engineer a solution.
Megan Jones, of Cordova, reached out to Muddy's to let them know she would be up for taking the pie on her Memphis to Dallas flight. Jones and her
father even offered to drive the threehour round trip to customer KL Adam in Bowie, but they were able to instead arrange a handoff with a TaskRabbit handyman in Dallas to make the delivery. "It's like a Hallmark movie," Gordon said of the pie's adventure. "People in Memphis are just the best people in the world, and we had help from other places, too."
The TaskRabbit handyman was prepared prior to Jones' heroics, as the Dallas-based Emporium Pies stepped up and gifted one of its pies to be delivered to the customer, Gordon said.
Gordon let those who were following the story on Muddy’s Bake Shop’s social media accounts know in the afternoon that the pie was en route to Adam. She summed up the delivery, which she coined “the Great TN2TX Pie Adventure,” as a "Thanksgiving miracle."
“I have SO MUCH to be thankful for and what a fantastic reminder that it's not about the turkey or the dressing or even the pie — it's all about each other and remembering that we're in this together, whatever it is,” she wrote.
Max Garland covers FedEx, logistics and health care for The Commercial Appeal. Reach him at max.garland@commercialappeal.com or 901-529-2651 and on Twitter @MaxGarlandTypes.