It’s a tale as old as Covid-19. When Corrie Strandjord and her husband, Eric Anderson, found themselves stuck in their Central District home during lockdown, they spent it making sourdough, just like you. 

“I had been a schoolteacher for 10 years,” Strandjord says, “and then I started a personal chef business in the fall of 2019, already with a love for sourdough bread—and pizza as an extension of that.” She had been making pizzas privately for a client before the pandemic, and Anderson, who was working in operations for a local ice creamery at the time, had some strong opinions about them.

“He thought we should sell this frozen pizza product. He tried it and was like, ‘This is so good! We could scale it.’ And I was like, ‘Well, that’s a nice dream for some other time. But I can’t get my head around that right now.’”

But then Anderson was laid off at the top of the pandemic, and their pizza dreams drifted back into view.

The couple opened up as Good Luck Bread in November 2020, originally operating out of the kitchen at Dino’s Tomato Pie on Capitol Hill, with Strandjord as the pizza chef and Anderson on operations. At the time, Dino’s wasn’t open for dine-in, and its takeout program closed around 8pm, so owner Brandon Pettit invited the pair to use the kitchen at night to make pizzas. “We’re buddies with Brandon,” Strandjord says, “and he’s kind of incubated a lot of businesses this way. He’s just a very generous person.”

They used Dino’s as a safe space to slowly experiment with different types of sourdough pies before flash-freezing them. This lucky start, combined with some notes from Mt. Bagel owner Roan Hartzog, propelled Good Luck Bread into a quick stride, employing a subscription model similar to Mt. Bagel’s. A loyal base of delivery customers followed.

Today, Good Luck Bread operates with a small staff out of a commissary kitchen in SoDo. Originally strictly delivery, the team now opens up its space on Saturdays for pickups, when Strandjord bakes fresh bread for customers. Cookies, beer, and wine are also on offer. She adds that they’re on the lookout for their next kitchen, once their lease is up, and they hope to do more in-person retail with the new space, like serving hot pizza alongside the frozen kind.

“Actually, this summer, we’re doing some hot pizza popups around town,” Strandjord says. She refers to a recent popup at Darkalino’s in Pioneer Square, where the featured flavors included a classic pepperoni “and then what we’re calling Adult Cheese, which has a spicy sauce made from Calabrian chile. We use Grande mozzarella, from Wisconsin, which we pile up, and it gets the really nice crispy cheese curtains, the frico.” 

Other featured flavors have included a pepperoni-and-mushroom pie, as well as Millennial Pink, with fresh ricotta and fried shallots on a vodka sauce base. “And then another one we're calling Tiny Meatball that has little meatballs,” Strandjord says with a laugh. “We have a cat named Tiny Meatball, so it’s our homage to our little meatball.”

On the subject of how she and Anderson chose their business name, Strandjord says, “You know, it's kind of an old name We’ve always been schemers, and years ago we had a silly idea for a bar that we called Good Luck, where we were thinking it would have a vending machine where it’s all domestic beer but then there’s some, like, really nice beer, and it’s all a dollar. So you can get lucky.” 

They grabbed the name for their pizza biz from that idea, she says, not to refer to the marvelous ease with which the pizza business came to them. “Maybe we are charmed, though, now that I think about it.”