The Williams sisters in Des Moines are leading a volunteer effort to bake hundreds of pies for Thanksgiving and they hope to expand the operation beyond Des Moines in the future.
Their “Eat Free Pie” odyssey began in 2020, during the pandemic, after Kaylee Williams had a conversation with her 70-year-old neighbor Chuck. “We were standing in our front yards and he said: ‘I’m old and I’m immunocompromised and so I’ll have to be alone for the holiday,'” Kaylee Williams told Radio Iowa. And I said: ‘Well, Chuck, what if I made you a pie?’ And he said: ‘Well, that’d be great,’ and I went home and made Chuck a pie….and then I thought to myself: ‘I wonder how many people are going to be alone on Thanksgiving Day?”
Williams put a form on the internet inviting neighbors to sign up and got far more responses than she’d expected. “I called my sister. I had to call in the big guns. I was like: ‘What do I do now?’ Kaylee Williams said, laughing. “We pulled together a whole group of friends to bake pies and then they brought them to my house and I had pies all over the living room, on the record player, in the kitchen and then we called more friends to deliver the pies.”
Clair Williams came up with the system for labeling and distributing 40 pies back in 2020. It’s year six of the operation and the pie count is into the hundreds. “We have a little bit of a larger operating team this year that’s helping out on all fronts between logistics and baking pies and picking up pies and packaging pies,” Clair Williams said. “Lots of volunteers.”
One of those volunteers is their dad, who taught his daughters how to bake pies. “We used to pick blackberries over at the Heartland Reserve Nature Center. We grew up in Cedar Falls and our dad is a praire biologist,” Kaylee Williams said, “and he’d take us out and we’d look at the plants and then we’d take these blackberries and bring them home.”
Clair Williams hopes the family’s “Eat Free Pie” playbook can be used to expand to other places in Thanksgiving 2026. “Ultimate vision? How great would it be if we could spread ‘Eat Free Pie’ across Iowa and have ‘Eat Free Pie’ Iowa City and ‘Eat Free Pie’ Cedar Rapids? Who’s to say we couldn’t?” Clair Williams asked rhetorically.
Sign ups for this year’s batch of free pies ended yesterday and they’ll be delivered to doorsteps tomorrow.