Business sprang from homesickness

[attach]6796[/attach]Coach House Shortbread Company’s owner Carl Stryg refers to his bakery and retail shop as his shortbread laboratory. Describing the treat he’s spent over 25 years perfecting, he quotes the words of a local food writer.

“I think Cynthia David said it best — crisp on the outside with a meltingly tender heart,” Stryg says from his shop at Queen and Carlaw. “I would love for people to take away that it’s a quality product made with love.”

After studying at the National Ballet School, Stryg was in New York City in 1986 to pursue singing but soon embarked on another career path. Feeling homesick one night, he whipped up a batch of shortbread cookies, which have been part of his family’s Christmas tradition since he was a child when he would steal out of the cookie jar when no one was looking.

“The landlord, not knowing I had made it, asked me where I had bought it and a little light bulb just started over my head,” he says. “I said well I made it and he said you should sell it, one thing led to another and he took them into his store in Trump Tower.”

Although Stryg successfully got the cookies into several stores in the Big Apple, once he moved back to Toronto he had to devise a different game plan.

His sister took some of his shortbread to a party catered by Dinah’s Cupboard, whose owner Dinah Koo tasted them and decided to sell them in her store, marking his first client in Canada.

After working out of his mom’s tiny kitchen and renting a pastry kitchen at night to bake from 11:00 p.m. to 5 a.m. whenever needed, Stryg eventually found a base in an old coach house. The building, combined with the move to focus on savoury shortbread in addition to sweet flavours led him to change the company’s name from La Zecca Specialty Foods to Coach House Shortbread Company.

“Somewhere along the way it was suggested to me that I try and sell the cookies at the One of a Kind Show and that absolutely turned into the most amazing pairing of brands,” he says. “Something really magic happens there for me and as soon as the clients at that show started to find me in my booth, it just blew up really I was not ready and it’s just really grown.”

In addition to taking part in several other shows throughout the year, the cookies are also available in select retailers (especially around Christmas time), through his website and by appointment in shop when he’s not open for extended hours in March and for the festive buzz in fall and winter.

“The business is intensely seasonal,” he says. “There’s really very little demand this time of year until just before Easter when there’s a little burst and then it’s just me and the crickets again until I start baking for my fall inventory in mid to late August, and then honestly all hell breaks loose. It’s crazy busy and it’s not unusual for me to work 16 hour days for three months in a row.”

While the biggest seller is the original, Stryg’s personal favourites are the almond and sugared rose in the sweet flavours and the walnut and BellaVitano for savoury.

In December his shortbread was named the top choice in a blind taste test of six other shortbread cookie varieties in the Globe and Mail.

“It was thrilling, totally out of the blue,” says Stryg. “There are lots of great products in this country, I was thrilled and then I was particular happy to find out that it had been a blind taste test because they were really just judging it on the product itself.”

Although the cookies have grown in popularity, he’s maintained a small batch production despite requests from large wholesalers. Recalling a card he received 15 years ago from a family that wrote the message: “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without your cookies,” he says he still has the card and the family continues to shop from him even though the kids are now grown-up.

“That’s really why I stay small,” he says, adding it also allows him to have quality control. “It’s those stories. You couldn’t have that if it was a conveyer belt cooking them out somewhere and they were all just arriving at wholesalers and giant Costco bins. That’s a viable way to do business but it’s really not how I choose to be.”

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