Cookies Without Compromise from Real Treat
By Lorrie Baumann
A preference for organic products shouldn’t mean having to give up entirely the swooningly hedonistic experience of biting into a cookie replete with quantities of butter and sweet with the taste of real sugar, according to Jacqueline Day, the Founder of Real Treat. She and the other women who work with her in her bakery make cookies that she says are “unapologetically delicious,” but also organic.
She set up shop at Specialty Food LIVE! in January to introduce the American market to her new Pantry product line, a line of cookie that offers the flavors of childhood indulgent experience of her Top Shelf line that’s been in the American market for the past year and a half. Launched last fall, the new line includes Chocolate Chunk, Oatmeal Raisin, Brown Sugar Shortbread made to her family’s recipe and Dark Chocolate Cookies with Almonds and Sea Salt. “Pantry’s all about nostalgia, after-school snacks fresh out of the oven – the flavors that most people crave,” she said. “Everybody’s working at home in their sweat pants, and people think less about calories. People’s priorities have shifted and are gravitating toward things that give us comfort…. What tastes like a hug more than what we used to enjoy at home when we were kids?”
Top Shelf, her previous line, has been in the American market for about a year and a half and offers more sophisticated flavors designed to appeal to the adults who offered gracious hospitality to their friends until it was no longer safe to do so. Those flavors are sophisticated, even surprising. The Lemon Sables with Herbes de Provence pair gracefully with a cheese board, for instance. “We sell a lot of those to fine cheese shops,” Day said. The Dark Chocolate Chunk with Smoked Pecans pairs cozily with a glass of fine bourbon whose sharp edges have been smoothed away by time in the barrel. “We almost called it The Dude. Men really like them,” Day said.
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Organic though her cookies are, they’re not the kind of cookies that she’s used to seeing in the stores that cater to customers who feel that food has to be a compromise with indulgence for the sake of health. “In the treat space, people still think of organic as not indulgent. Some retailers in the natural food space, when you go into their cookie aisle, you find a collection of keto treats – I call them ‘consolation prize treats.’ It’s not very sweet, but you can tell yourself it’s a brownie,” she said. “Have you ever derived joy from a cookie that’s made from spelt and carob chips? They’re health food that’s pretending to be a treat. There’s definitely a market for that. That’s great. They can do that. But those of us who are foodies want something that’s genuinely delicious.”
One of the ironies of that point of view is that Real Treat cookies actually contain less sugar than many mass-market cookies on supermarket shelves. That’s because they don’t lean on sugar to satisfy consumers’ desire to taste their cookies, Day said. Instead, the Real Treat cookies offer a depth of flavor that comes from the complex alchemy of organic wheat, oats, really great fine Italian dark chocolate and fresh spices to delight the senses. “All the standards that you would apply to a really great restaurant experience, we apply to our cookies,” she said. “If I’m going to have a cookie, I want something that’s going to satisfy my craving for indulgence. There really is not that in the organic space. We are disrupting cookies by making them indulgent, delicious and organic – real butter and sweetened with cane sugar.”
The cookies in Real Treat’s Top Shelf line are packaged in 4-ounce boxes, while the cookies in the Pantry line are packaged in bags of five or six ounces, depending on the variety. Each package holds about 10 to 12 cookies, depending on whether they’re a delicate cookie like the Lemon Sables or a heartier treat like the Oatmeal Raisin cookies. Real Treat ships directly from the company’s headquarters in Canada to retailers anywhere in the United States, with additional distribution channels coming in the near future. Also coming to the American market in the near future is a line of Real Treat Drinking Chocolate, which will be unveiled to trade show attendees when it’s possible to gather again in person to taste the new products.
