Confection perfection Handcrafted toffee business hits the sweet spot By: David Sanderson Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Thursday, Jun. 14, 2018

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/06/2018 (2388 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Since launching her business in 2013, Cate Dyck, founder of Utoffeea, a home-based enterprise that produces what’s been described as Canada’s best toffee, has become a regular participant at maker events such as Scattered Seeds.

With myriad sales under her belt, Dyck easily recognizes many of the people who make a beeline to her booth, at market after market. Still, there are a few familiar faces who, in a backhanded, complimentary kind of way, act as if they’re seeing her handmade treats, prepared with cashews, buttery toffee and swirled chocolate, for the first time, when they sidle up and remark, “Hmm, what have we here?”

“I don’t know if they feel funny or embarrassed or whatever asking for a free sample, which I’m obviously more than happy to give them, but instead of just saying hi, they pretend as if they’ve never tried my stuff before, while telling me how yummy it is,” Dyck says with a laugh, seated inside a bustling café on Henderson Highway, “10 minutes” from her home in Birds Hill.

Dyck, a married mother of four, fell in love with cooking in Grade 3, when she and her classmates learned how to make bannock. As she got older, her parents instituted a house rule that required her and her three siblings to take turns preparing dinner for the family one night a week. Except because she enjoyed being in the kitchen so much, she often wound up with an extra shift or two.

“The deal was if we didn’t make supper, we had to wash the dishes. Since my sister preferred doing dishes to cooking, I usually ended up making supper on her nights, too,” she says, listing fajitas and made-from-scratch soup as her go-to meals, back then.

In 2012, Dyck was visiting a friend when her host brought out toffee to nibble on. After taking a bite, she asked what store it came from. She was surprised to discover it was home-made because it had never occurred to her toffee was a sweet you could cook yourself, she says.

A few days later, after researching recipes, she made her first batch of toffee. It didn’t look or taste as good as what she makes nowadays, but it was flavourful enough that she was encouraged to give it another shot. “I’m not a perfectionist in life except for when I’m in the kitchen,” she says, pointing out by December that year, reviews of her toffee were so positive her husband’s boss requested a slew for their company Christmas party.

“Everybody there couldn’t get enough, to the point that the next year, they asked my husband if he was going to be bringing the ‘Christmas crack,’ again,” she laughingly says. (Initially, Dyck was going to name her venture Zebra Bark, because of each piece’s unique striped pattern; she settled on Utoffeea, a play on the word utopia, after asking herself what zebras have to do with Manitoba or, for that matter, candy.)

Thus far, 2018 has marked a departure for Dyck, a professional photographer who left her job as a shoe store manager to devote her full attention to her kids and toffee, in that order. Until this year, she was content turning out toffee on an as-needed basis, ahead of whatever market she was scheduled to take part in. But as one retailer after another kept approaching her, inquiring about carrying Utoffeea, she had a decision to make.

“I’ve never envisioned my stuff in a grocery store aisle, next to 200 other treats. I want Utoffeea to stand out… to be more of a high-end, prestigious brand sort-of-thing. It’s been a difficult balance because I didn’t want to turn down sales, but at the same time, I wanted to be choosy about who I aligned myself with,” she says.

Utoffeea is currently for sale at six locations in Winnipeg, including Coal and Canary Candle Company at The Forks, Crampton’s Market on Waverley Street and Jardins St. Leon on St. Mary’s Road. It’s also on the menu at Portage Avenue’s Scout Coffee + Tea and Brandon’s Fraser Sneath Coffee; both cafes add a sprinkle of her toffee to their affogoto al caffe, an espresso shot typically topped with a scoop of ice cream.

Earlier this week, Culinary Adventure Co., a Toronto-based venture that stages foodie tours in six Canadian cities, hosted its inaugural Exchange District Food Tour – a twice-weekly, guided walkabout that includes stops at Amsterdam Tea Room, 211 Bannatyne Ave., and Miss Browns, 288 William Ave. The three-hour trek also makes a pitstop at Generation Green, 433 Main St., which has been selling Utoffeea since February. (Because Dyck uses an ice cream scoop or kitchen hammer to break up the finished product once it’s cooled down, each piece of toffee is unique.)

“When we target a city for our tours, we spend months eating at restaurants, meeting food artisans and talking with local chefs — people who tell us, ‘you have to go here’ or ‘you must try this,’” says Kevin Durkee, owner of Culinary Adventure Co., over the phone from Toronto.

Generation Green, formerly at The Forks, was one of the places on Durkee’s radar when he arrived in Winnipeg. On his way out of the store, he purchased a few items for the trip home, including a bag of Utoffeea toffee.

“I’ve since learned Cate’s toffee has a shelf-life of six months, but I’d have to say it’s more like six seconds. I put it in my carry-on for the flight back to Toronto and I don’t think I made it to the Manitoba-Ontario border before it was all gone.”

This fall, Durkee, whose company also conducts excursions in Toronto, Kingston, Charlottetown, Ottawa and Halifax, intends to introduce Utoffeea “to the world,” when he brings a bunch along to an international trade show in Las Vegas.

“I have 100 per cent fallen in love with (Utoffeea) and any chance I get to showcase it to others, I’m happy to do it,” he says. “Sure, you can get toffee almost anywhere in the world, but there’s something particularly unique about Cate’s — you can almost feel the love that goes into each bag when you break one open — that makes it the best I’ve ever tasted in this country.”

Back at the coffee shop, Dyck grins from ear to ear, when asked if her toffee recipe is written down anywhere, or stored away in her noggin, for safekeeping.

“It’s funny you should bring that up because my husband and I had almost the exact same conversation the other day,” she says, crediting her hubby for being her “business partner, financial guy and display builder.”

“We were on the couch watching TV and I leaned over and said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, do you even know how to make the toffee, or are you just going to turn around and give the recipe away to one of our friends?’ His response was, ‘What are you talking about? If you’re not around, there are still going to be four hungry mouths to feed. I’ll make one call to Costco, and walk away a millionaire.’”

For more information on Utoffeea, and for a complete list of retail locations, go to www.utoffeea.com.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca