Saint Joseph's College breaks longest line of pie world record

image from St. Joesph's College Flickr

Students, faculty, and community members alike at Saint Joseph’s College topped the world record for “longest line of pies” on Nov. 24 during the sixth annual Great Thanksgiving Pie Bake-Off.

The previous record was set on on May 26, 2013, when Edgar Hensel set the record when he assembled a 1,477-pie line in Lower Saxony, Germany. Hensel’s pie line measured 907 feet, 1.8 inches, according to Guinness World Records.

Last week, it took more than 140 volunteers a total of eight hours and 10 minutes to assemble and line up a 1,161-foot line of 1,548 apple pies on 56 tables.

They beat Hensel’s record by 71 pies and approximately 254 feet.

Stuart Leckie, general manager of the college’s food service provider, Pearson’s Café, and organizer of the bake-off, says the effort required more than 1,000 pounds of butter, 10,000 apples and 300 pounds of sugar.

About 80% of the ingredients were donated to the task from local community members, he says.

“It was a daunting task and we had so many volunteers come out,” Leckie says. “It was a great day to work with the community, kids, families and people from the college.”

Leckie says the bake-off tradition started six years ago when they made pies for customers and clients at the college’s food pantry, Catherine’s Cupboard, and local food pantries.

“It started with 100 pies and then demand increased a little more, so they next year we made 200 pies to go out with Thanksgiving food baskets,” he says. “It became a fun competition to see how many pies we could do in three hours.”

After the bake-off in 2013, a local television station interviewed Leckie about the event and he said maybe they would break a world record dealing with pies.

“I wrote a note to Guinness and asked what record their was for pies and they told me that there was a record for longest line of pies lined up end to end, touching and they had to be given out to charity,” he says. “I said it on live television and now I had to stick to my word.”

Last year, Leckie sent an application to Guinness World Records to declare his intentions to break the record.

On Nov. 24, two witnesses watched the event unfold, with volunteers videotaping and photographing the whole proceedings in order to provide evidence of the record-breaking effort to the Guinness judges.

Kathleen March was one of the volunteers and says she arrived at noon with her four children to help set up the stations and she stayed through the whole process to count every pie at the very end.

“During the hours in between, I was in the position of helping just about anywhere,” she says. “I would help fill a void in the processing that needed extra help, peeling, rolling dough, crimping pie crust, wrapping them in plastic wrap. I also found myself offering baking advice to people who had never made a pie before in their life.”

March says the atmosphere was “a happy place with lots of chatter and smiles.”

“People got to know each other and meet others in the community,” she says. “One of my favorite moments was watching my 9-year-old daughter, Virginia, with one of her best friends, Adelyn, stuffing pie tins with apples and topping them with crusts at record speed like professionals in a bakery with cheery faces and seriousness.”

After the final pies had been counted and documented shortly after 9 p.m., the pies were placed into individual boxes to distribute to local area food pantries just in time for Thanksgiving.

“This goal, which Pearson’s Café general manager Stuart Leckie set in November 2013, represents a year of planning, collaboration, and teamwork,” says David Svenson, communications officer for the college, in a press release.

In order to pack up all the pies, March says the volunteers turned to social media to reach out to students on campus.

Once boxed, Portland’s Wayside Food Programs assisted in the distribution of the pies.

“It was great to be part of this, not just because we were trying to break a record, but it was fun to set the bar high and achieve it,” March says. “Doing this for others in need was always at the fore front of my mind.”

 Kyle Plantz is a junior at Boston University.

This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.