C is for candy sushi…

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/11/2017 (3179 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In a last-ditch effort to get her fledgling business off the ground, Cori Poon travelled to Toronto in September 2015 to participate in a sugar-coated event called Canada’s Baking and Sweets Show.

Poon, the founder of Winnipeg’s Sweet C Bakery, was there to promote her line of candy sushi — a colourful confection the 32-year-old married mother of three had been marketing for two years, with limited success.

“Even though we were very much in the red at the time, my husband Jeff and I decided to bring our three kids along and turn it into a family trip,” Poon says, running her fingers through her close-cropped hair. “Except we bombed, and had to spend even more money, to ship three-quarters of what we brought with us, back to Winnipeg.”

A few days after returning home, Cori and Jeff were seated on their living-room couch, trying to figure out their next move. Cori was already close to tears when Jeff, who had quit his restaurant manager’s job earlier that year to devote himself full time to Sweet C Bakery, took her by the hand and muttered, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can do this anymore.” That was when she broke into a full sob.

“Just give me a little more time,” she begged him. “Just a little more… ”

Well, what a difference two years can make. In mid-October, she and Jeff began shipping six-, 12- and 18-piece trays of their hand-assembled, candy sushi to Hallmark Canada gift shops from coast-to-coast, bringing the total number of stores carrying their line of products, which also include edible cookie dough and gourmet popcorn, to “between 45 and 50, I’ll have to double-check,” Poon says, reaching for her phone. And on Oct. 29, they toasted the one-year anniversary of Sweet C Bakery’s retail location, at 1171 Kildare Ave. E.

“Some days are slower than others — I mean let’s face it, nobody wants a cupcake when it’s 40 fricking below — but it’s not always about how much you make,” she goes on, seated at a table facing her bakery’s hot pink feature wall. “My dad was only 48 when he passed away after a three-month battle with pancreatic cancer, and one of the things he told me before he died was not to go through life with regrets. He had a few, and said we should seize every opportunity that comes our way, because you never know what’s waiting around the corner.”

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Poon was born and raised in Swan River. She learned the value of a dollar early on, she says, because anytime she asked her parents for a new CD or the latest style of jeans, their response was, “There’s no extra money; if there’s something you really want, you’ll have to work for it.”

Knowing they were telling the truth, Poon never complained. One year, her mother and father worked 16 jobs between the two of them “just to pay the bills,” she says, and “it still wasn’t enough.”

Heeding her parents’ advice, at age 12 Poon began baking cookies, pies and loaves of bread, which she proceeded to peddle at weekend farmers’ markets. She adopted that same approach years later, when, as a stay-at-home mom, she wanted to help contribute to household expenses.

“Money was really tight after we moved to Winnipeg in 2011,” says Poon, who met her husband while she was living and working in Ottawa. “Madilynn, our eldest, was 9 months old at the time, and I was pregnant with our second. My thinking was, our bank account is dwindling, I’m baking for us already, so why not do what I did before, and try selling some, too?”

Poon’s first break came in 2012, when, thanks to a last-minute cancellation, she was invited to participate in the Wonderful Wedding Show, held annually at the RBC Convention Centre. (By then, Poon, who was renting space at a commercial kitchen, had come up with a name for her biz, albeit, her second choice. She initially wanted to coin it Boomerang Bakery — “the bakery that keeps you coming back for more,” she says in a sing-song voice — but because that tag was registered already, she opted for Sweet C Bakery, the C standing for “cookies, cakes, Cori… whatever you like.”)

During the wedding show, an attendee asked her if she could create a dessert table for her son’s bar mitzvah celebration. Poon said she’d be honoured to, and, after doing some research, decided to include candy sushi in the mix, after spotting variations of it online.

“I’ve never pretended I invented (candy sushi), because if you want to make it yourself, it’s easy to find out how. We were, however, the first people to market it creatively and aggressively,” she says, explaining her rolls consist of homemade Rice Krispie treats intermixed with gummies.

Because people who attended the bar mitzvah “went crazy” over her candy sushi, which comes with chocolate-sauce-as-soya-sauce and green-vanilla-buttercream-as-wasabi, Poon began featuring it at the downtown Winnipeg farmers’ market, where, by 2013, she had become a familiar face.

In the summer of 2013, a representative from Poke PR, a New York City-based public relations firm, contacted Poon after spotting pictures of her candy sushi on Instagram. The rep asked Poon how quickly she could ship 50 trays to the Big Apple for a promotional campaign introducing actor Salma Hayek’s new line of nail polish, dubbed Nuance.

“At first I was like, ‘Sorry, where are you calling from, again?’ and ‘This is for Salma Hayek? Are you kidding me?’” says Poon, noting after she successfully filled the order, her sushi rolls garnered shout-outs in periodicals such as Cosmopolitan and Elle.

Accolades aside, the Poons were still drowning in debt two years ago when Jeff acceded to his wife’s plea to give Sweet C Bakery one last shot. By March 2016, they had secured financing for their store. By September of that same year, they had spent more than $100,000 in renovations, to transform a former tanning salon into a 1,000-square-foot, retail bakery. Given their hard work and devotion, it wasn’t surprising Poon had a lump in her throat, when she flipped the sign on their front door from “closed” to “open” for the first time, and spotted two-dozen people outside, patiently waiting in line to see what she and her staff had to offer.

“It’s as if people in this part of the city were really waiting for a place they could call their own,” she says, pausing to dab her eyes, stating “I’ll be OK; talking about it always gets me a little bit emotional.”

Sweet C Bakery, which, in addition to cookies, cupcakes and brownies, carries a variety of made-in-Manitoba goods such as Smak Dab mustard and Sheepdog coffee, is open to the public Wednesday to Saturday. Sundays are family days, Poon insists, while Mondays and Tuesdays are reserved for completing orders for their wholesale clients.

“We’ve sent (sushi) to every state south of the border, for sure, as well as France, China, New Zealand…” Poon says, adding she was recently contacted by a retailer in Australia who is interested in carrying her candy sushi, which has a shelf-life of 90 days. “Our frozen, ready-to-bake cookie dough is the next thing we’ll be rolling out to stores. We just got accepted by Save-on-Foods and Red River Co-op, and we’ll be shipping it to a lot of smaller boutique-type stores, as well.”

Given her store’s humble beginnings, and the fact there are days when she and Jeff still “can’t rub two nickels together,” customers often ask why she doesn’t just simply raise her prices “and stuff.”

“We’re here to make money, don’t get me wrong,” she says. “But first and foremost, I want Sweet C Bakery to be a place families can go, even when they’re on a tight budget. We know what’s it like to say ‘No, mommy and daddy can’t afford that.’ So we want parents to be able to come here to celebrate milestones with their kids, without having to spend a million dollars.”

For more information, go to www.sweetcbakery.com.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca