A naturally sweet move

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This article was published 25/05/2020 (2245 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The cookies, muffins, brownies and cinnamon rolls that Anna May Van Dyke makes lack the typical ingredients of wheat flour and sugar, but they are still sweet treats.

Van Dyke, who launched her business Keto Treats Bakery about two years ago, said she’s able to swap out these two high-carbohydrate items with almond and coconut flour and stevia, a naturally occurring sweetener.

Headingley residents will soon be able to pick up low carbohydrate sweet treats at Keto Treats Bakery’s new location at 15 Dodds Road after Van Dyke moves her retail and online business from its current location at 664 King Edward St. in Winnipeg.

Van Dyke said she hopes to offer in-store sales to customers within the next few months.
As her business’ name indicates, all of her baked goods, including breads, buns and pizzas, contain ingredients compliant with a keto diet. The keto or ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate diet that, in medicine, is used mainly to treat hard-to-control epilepsy in children. The diet forces the body to burn fats rather than carbohydrates.

Treatment of epilepsy is how Van Dyke was first introduced to this way of eating about a decade ago after her son experienced a seizure.

“I was looking for things to help him,” she said, adding that the keto diet also helped her overcome her own health problems involving inflammation and auto-immunity.

“I didn’t realize that it (keto) was a diet at first.”

She used trial and error to develop keto baking recipes for her family. After moving to Winnipeg and starting to work outside her home, she searched for keto baked goods in local grocery and health food stores but couldn’t find any.

She told her chiropractor about her search and he encouraged her to turn the recipes she had developed into a business venture.

Van Dyke said she was amazed that Winnipeg-based Vita Health was eager to stock her frozen baked goods. While her sales at Vita Health stores were good, she later decided to concentrate on online orders and a goal of expanding countrywide.

This goal is what attracted her to her new Headingley location.

“The reason we chose it is distribution across Canada. It’s close to the Trans-Canada Highway. It’s a central location.”

Van Dyke said the new facility will include a kitchen and freezer, storage and warehouse space with access for loading orders.

She plans to concentrate on shipping frozen items, but local customers can continue placing online orders for contactless pickup or delivery.

One thing she said she isn’t duplicating at the Headingley site is the storefront cafe that was part of the King Edward Street location. With the current COVID-19 restrictions in place, coffee shop service isn’t possible at this time anyway.

For more information on Keto Treats Bakery, see ketotreatsbakery.ca/#/