It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

That may partly explain why on Thursday morning, exactly seven days till T-day, the staff at Wild Oats Bakery & Cafe in Brunswick is relaxed, cheerful, even chill.

This despite prepping more than 2,168 pies of all sorts, 800-plus orders of all sizes, 390 pints of turkey gravy (“homemade the traditional way, but with no lumps!”), 105 green bean casserole sides and — excepting the roast turkey itself — just about anything else you might need to feed out-of-town guests and host the Thanksgiving feast.

“Everybody is crushing it,” Savory Manager Declan Hall said as he calmly checked the day’s production schedule. When you’re working with heat, knives and large equipment, frenzy is unsafe, he added. Hall’s biggest Thanksgiving “hiccup” this year was rejiggering the gravy recipe.

“We try not to get frantic around here,” Cakes Manager Olivia Daitch echoed. “It’s my seventh year working here and my third year in management during the holiday so I have a pretty good game plan that’s been passed down.”

The warm-up to Thanksgiving at Wild Oats got underway when the ocean was still pleasurably swimmable, the local tomatoes at their best and cranberries just a twinkle in the eye. On Sept. 1, the management team began to scrutinize menus and numbers from previous years.

What sold well? What didn’t? What favorites needed tweaking? What can be made ahead and frozen with no harm done? How many pounds of Oreos will be needed for the crusts on the chocolate mousse pies, and how many flats of Brussels sprouts to roast and toss with maple-mustard sauce? And as casseroles, corn breads and turkey-shaped cookies pile up, where’s the space to store them?

Over the fall, new staff will be hired and trained to replace the college kids who left at the end of the summer; prices will be decided upon; production schedules will be meticulously set and color-coded; and a handful of new dishes will be “trialed,” iterations made as many as 100 times before they are considered ready for prime time.

This year, there’s been just a single seasonal hire, someone to help churn out pies, including a daunting order of 900 for Martin’s Point Health Care Center to be delivered to each of its several locations Tuesday morning. A rented 18-wheeler freezer truck has been parked in the Wild Oats lot to store the pies in the final days before the holiday.

By November, Wild Oats is running at full throttle, producing its usual considerable array of soups, sandwiches, grab-and-go meals and more, all while furiously chipping away at its Thanksgiving specials. In the 34 years since it opened in the Tontine Mall on Maine Street — it’s since moved to Brunswick Landing — Thanksgiving sales at Wild Oats have expanded steadily. And the popular bakery-cafe, known for its high-quality, handmade food, has continually fine-tuned its systems.

As Bake-off Department Manager Julie Rand put it, “It’s a very well-oiled machine during the holidays.”

GHOST OF THANKSGIVINGS PAST

It wasn’t always that way.

Marshall Shepherd, now with an MBA and co-managing a business with nearly 100 employees, was in his mother’s belly when Becky and David Shepherd launched Wild Oats. Thanksgiving orders hovered between 20 and 30 in the early years for some 10 products, and if year-over-year orders went up by two, it was something to celebrate.

As a small boy, Marshall remembers the joy of half-day of school on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. “I’d get home just so excited for my school vacation,” he said, “and I’d immediately get driven to the bakery.” Marshall and his three siblings would help their parents and the bakery-cafe’s initial six employees, putting labels on pie boxes when they were small, folding boxes and packaging food as they got older.

If somebody neglected to tuck the Spinach & Artichoke Dip into the bag with the rest of a customer’s order, David Shepherd might get in the family minivan and personally deliver the item.

“At the beginning, we did mostly everything by the seat of our pants,” Becky Shepherd said.

As business at Thanksgiving continued to grow, they realized that items could, and should, be made in stages, she said: pie crusts rolled ahead of time, then stacked and frozen; dry ingredients for biscuits combined and stored; recipes modified so they could be made in advance.

The initial 10 Thanksgiving items eventually grew to 50. Oven, freezer, cooler and kitchen space grew tighter and tighter on ordinary days, let alone at holiday time. So exactly five years ago, Wild Oats moved to a spacious, sunlit spot more than double the size of its original location.

As it happens, the company moved the very week of Thanksgiving – a mere eight months into the COVID pandemic and still two weeks before the first COVID vaccine was administered in Maine.

Movers hauled the large equipment, but the staff also helped move and quickly set up “a ton” of the smaller items, co-managing partner Colleen Gilliatt recalled. They’d intentionally run down the food stock at the old location so they wouldn’t have to move it, so to be ready for the busy Christmas season, the kitchen had to dial things up fast. Maybe any year since feels like a cake walk.

THE TURKEY TROT

About 10 days before Thanksgiving, as the first snow of the season gently fell in Brunswick, Gilliat and a co-worker spent four exhausting hours moving the nearly 1,000 pies bound for Martin’s Point into the rented freezer truck. Bundled in mittens and hats, they packaged them in milk crates, carted them outside, loaded them into a pickup truck, unloaded them into the frigid 18-wheeler — and repeated until done.

Inside the store, it was Marshall Shepherd’s daughter’s ninth birthday. Eight little girls were decorating sugar cookies, making whoopie pies and chocolate bark. The staff had assured him it was OK to hold her party during such a busy stretch. Still, between the pies, the party and the Thanksgiving rush, the hectic morning was “quite an adventure,” he said.

Months ago, the walk-in freezers at Wild Oats had been rearranged for the holidays. “In September, we basically remodel them to fit our holiday setup as best we can,” Gilliat said. “It’s a lot of jostling and moving.”

Even so, before the pies were moved to the truck, navigating the walk-in freezers had become “a bit of a wiggle,” Declan Hall said, demonstrating a wiggly kitchen dance move. Now, it’s almost time to rearrange the coolers in the kitchen and retail area for Thanksgiving pickup. When customers arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday to get their orders, they’ll be offered free cups of coffee while they wait for staff members to go from fridge to freezer to counter to gather their items. As they gather orders, these staff “shoppers” count their steps; prizes are involved. It’s one of several ways the management team tries to make the busy holiday stretch more fun.

Around the kitchen, handmade, adorably drawn Thanksgiving bingo cards are mostly filled in by now, the items a mix of work checklist and seasonal encouragement, with prizes here, too: Squares with “Everyone has a part in at least 1 holiday project,” “Strudels done!” and “No inventory discrepancies for 1 week” are interspersed with “Share your favorite holiday food” and “Everyone gives a compliment during the end-of-day meeting.”

With a week still to go, the kitchen staff is mostly winding down, filling chicken pot pies, icing turkey-shaped cookies, checking the accuracy of oven temperatures before the all-important Monday morning bake-off. For bakers, the final Thanksgiving push starts at 3 a.m. to bake the fruit pies, holiday breads and strudels. The day is hard work for the dishwashers, too (“support staff” in Wild Oats’ language), who must keep up with multiple sheet pans sticky with fruit pie drips and strudel glaze.

Despite waking at 1:30 a.m. and driving in from Auburn, Rand finds the annual bake-off energizing. When her day’s work is done, she’ll go home to bake five more pies for her own Thanksgiving table.

T-DAY

On Wednesday evening, Wild Oats staff will donate any products that didn’t sell to stock the “Family Fridge” they recently co-created at the Brunswick YMCA for people in need, Marshall Shepherd said. Once the fridge is full, any remaining food will go to the Mid Coast Hospital emergency room “to thank our health care workers who have to work on Thanksgiving,” he emailed.

Then it’s time to close shop and head home for two entire days off (which is not nothing in the food service industry). Wild Oats is normally open seven days a week, but six years ago, the company began closing on Black Friday. Until then, the bread baker had to come in the evening of Thanksgiving, while other kitchen staff were at it again at 5:30 a.m. Friday.

It was never a busy day for Wild Oats, so after nearly 30 years, they reconsidered that “pedal to the metal, all-day, every day” approach, Becky Shepherd said. “We needed to have a fresh start from all of the Thanksgiving hubbub.”

Meanwhile, on Thanksgiving Day as many as 100 Shepherds — cousins, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents and small children — also friends and a few staff members will gather in the cafe to feast. Even after months of painstaking holiday planning and labor, Becky and Marshall Shepherd look forward to it. “It’s my favorite holiday,” Becky Shepherd said.

“And we launch into Christmas on Saturday,” Marshall Shepherd added.