Pie Review: Whole Foods – Marionberry

Whole Foods has been on my pie-dar for awhile. Back on Pi Day, I had heard that they had a good deal on pies, but when I visited my local Whole Foods, NO pie. I think it might be because my Whole Foods is LAME… I didn’t see any pie the last time I went, either.

So, when my brother-in-law was in town, we were checking out the store in the Pearl District; he was curious, because he works at a Whole Foods in Austin, Tejas. The Pearl District store had pie! Boy did they have pie. They had standard 9 inch pies, and then they also had tiny pies suitable for two people. I chose the small, as my piet had been going south that week (family visiting = lots of eating out).

I got the marionberry pie, as this is one of my favorites. The pie was very pretty looking, to say the least. I wanted to eat it right there on the street as we walked back to the car. But, I was good and waited until the next evening… it’s better with ice cream anyways.

The crust was a really nice golden brown, and bubbled up high above the tin, like a cartoon pie. It was golden and flak, and thick on the edges, but not too thick. Very good crust.

The filling was also excellent; it actually seemed like a fresh marionberry filling, versus those standard marionberry fillings that you’ll find at a lot of eateries. Those fillings are more goopy and syrupy – like they tried too hard to stretch a few berries into a filling, but this wasn’t like that at all. It also had a great crust to filling ratio, not an overwhelming amount of either – enough to get some crust and some filling in every bite.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5. Given that it was Whole Foods, I figured it’d be pretty good – but this really impressed me. I enjoyed every bite, and I think this definitely has to rank toward the very top for grocery store bakery pies. Bravo!