A taste of the past

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This article was published 16/04/2017 (3411 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Every cake box from Jeanne’s Bakery, located at 931 Notre Dame Ave., comes stamped with the words, “We make memories.” If you think owner Jerry Penner paid some pricey, high-falutin’ ad agency to come up with that slogan for his business’s iconic confections — which, through the years, have been enjoyed by prime ministers, Queen Elizabeth II and the king of game shows (Monty Hall’s a big fan, we understand) — guess again.

A few years ago, Penner was working behind the counter of his store when he got into a conversation with a woman buying a marble slab cake. She lived in Vancouver, she mentioned, but had made the trip to Winnipeg on behalf of her mother, who had passed away that week.

“One of her mother’s wishes was that there would be a Jeanne’s cake at her funeral,” Penner says, seated in his neat-as-a-pin office.

“As she was leaving, she turned to me and said, ‘I just want you to know, this is more than a cake — this is a memory,’ at which point we both started crying.”

You would be hard-pressed to find many Manitobans who don’t have at least a passing acquaintance with Jeanne’s cakes. After all, it’s been 81 years since Jeanne Van Landeghem, the West End locale’s matriarch, began marketing her log-style confections, renowned for their shortbread crust base, Belgian chocolate swirls and butter icing. Except when Penner sat down with Van Landeghem’s grandson Donald Van Landeghem in 2003 to discuss purchasing the bakery from his family — more about that shortly — the only Jeanne he was familiar with spelled her name with an extra vowel and lived in a glass bottle on TV.

Penner grew up in Steinbach. Because his two older brothers were bakers, he went into that field as well. In 1980, at the tender age of 22, he bought an existing business in Winkler called Valley Bakery & Pastry Shop.

“There were 25 employees, and the next youngest person after me was 30,” recalls the married father of six.

“My first day on the job, I was in the kitchen surveying the workflow when one of the workers, who didn’t know I was the new boss, approached me and said, ‘Don’t you think you’ve been standing around doing nothing long enough? You should probably get to work by now.’”

In 2003, Penner turned the bakery over to his two oldest sons. It wasn’t that he wanted to retire; rather, he had decided the time was right to explore business opportunities in “slightly warmer” parts of the country. He flew to Victoria and Kelowna to check out properties that were for sale, but none of the established bakeries he looked at “clicked.”

Figuring he would find a place that suited his needs sooner or later, he returned to Winkler, where he kept himself busy running deliveries to Winnipeg for his sons. It was during one of those drop-offs when he heard about Jeanne’s Bakery for the first time.

“One morning, a wholesaler I was delivering to said, ‘Did you hear the news? Jeanne’s is for sale.’ I was like, ‘What’s Jeanne’s?,’ at which point he gave me a copy of the listing.”

 Penner didn’t give the piece of paper much thought, tossing it onto the backseat of his vehicle. He read it over more closely when he returned home, at which point he contacted the listing agent, stating he preferred to meet the owners face-to-face instead of going through a third party.

During Penner’s initial, two-hour get-together with Donald Van Landeghem, the two men spent “maybe five minutes” crunching numbers or discussing the company’s bottom line. They devoted most of their time chatting about what Jeanne’s cakes mean to folks from this neck of the woods.

“Here, it’s almost like you’re more of a caretaker than an owner because the bakery really belongs to the people of this city and province,” Penner says, noting he never gave a second’s thought to changing the name above the door from Jeanne’s to Jerry’s after assuming control.

“I haven’t discussed this with too many others, but Donald saw me, I believe, as a person willing to take on the sort of sacred trust that Jeanne’s (Bakery) is. While talking with him, I came to appreciate the loyalty people have towards this product and felt, if I bought the business, I would need to steward things accordingly. I still feel that way, to this day.”

Over time, umpteen gallons of ink have been spilled detailing how ex-Winnipeggers from all four corners of the globe make pilgrimages to Jeanne’s Bakery, when they’re back in town visiting friends and family. Some of Penner’s regular customers work at the airport; they tell him hardly a day passes when they don’t spot somebody walking through the terminal with one of the bakery’s telltale boxes under their arm.

A couple of former Winnipeg residents who have resettled in Calgary don’t have to travel quite so far to get a taste of home.

Sue Ghebari and her husband are the owners of a Food Fare outlet on 19th Street N.E. in Cowtown, a store that just so happens to be the only place west of the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border that keeps a healthy supply of Jeanne’s cakes in stock on a regular basis.

“We bought the store in 2008, and the owners before us were originally from Winnipeg, so they stocked Jeanne’s cakes,” Ghebari says over the phone.

“When we took over, we decided to carry on that tradition.”

Every other week, Ghebari signs for a shipment of 100 Jeanne’s cakes, which are brought in directly from Winnipeg. That number may seem substantial, Ghebari says, but it isn’t to people who need reassurance there will be a cake available when they walk through her doors.

“We’ll get people driving through Calgary on their way to Fort McMurray or wherever who will call ahead and tell us to put a cake aside under their name,” Ghebari goes on. “I’ll tell them not to worry, we have plenty in the cooler, but they’ll answer, ‘No, you don’t understand. You have to put one aside. I can’t take any chances.’”

Being an Albertan, Ghebari admits she used to be curious why so many ex-Winnipeggers wouldn’t dream of toasting a birthday, anniversary or even the arrival of a new puppy without a Jeanne’s cake.

“One time, I even said to a person buying one from us, ‘What’s the big deal with these things anyway?’ At which point she opened the box of the cake she was paying for and said, ‘Here, have a bite and see for yourself.’”

Ghebari’s review: “They don’t taste anything like those sweet, store-bought cakes you get everywhere else. There’s texture, but they don’t have that same thickness that makes you feel full after eating a slice.”

On a weekly basis, Penner’s staff bakes between 1,500 and 2,000 cakes — slightly more in busy weeks such as the one that just passed, leading up to the Easter holiday.

Those are hefty sales figures, for sure, but Penner, who stores Van Landeghem’s original, handwritten recipes in a safety deposit box, isn’t exactly resting on his laurels. The bakery recently added its own line of pizza dough to the mix, the owner’s reasoning being if there’s a birthday party taking place, there are usually a few pizzas close by. As well as upping Jeanne’s presence on social media, via a Twitter feed and Facebook page, Penner is also planning to reintroduce a few items his company’s namesake used to offer in the 1940s and ’50s.

“I have an old (recipe) book of Jeanne’s, and one of the things in it is a cherry blossom brownie,” he says. “It has a very unique ingredient I never would have guessed would be in a brownie, so I’m really excited to see how that’s going to go over.”

The only other thing Penner may want to consider somewhere down the line is a table and chairs for customers who can’t wait until they get home to dive into their purchases.

“We actually began offering plastic knives and forks after we started noticing all these people sitting in their cars in our parking lot for 15 or 20 minutes, eating their cake,” he says laughing.

David Sanderson writes about Winnipeg-centric businesses and restaurants.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca