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9/7/2014
Sweet success: How Ryerson is supporting T.O. businesses | The Grid TO
_PHOTOS: EMMA MCINTYRE/THE GRID
Andrea Mut of Andrea's Gerrard St. Bakery
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WED JUN 11, 2014
FOOD AND DRINK
Sweet success
By ordering from small Toronto­area businesses and suppliers to
fill the bellies of its students and staff, Ryerson University is
supporting the local economy and serving better cookies.
BY: SARAH ELTON
When Ryerson University hired local chef Joshna Maharaj to lead a big­picture rethink of their
food services last year, they didn’t realize that the transformation would extend all the way down
to the cookies. Trained as a chef at George Brown College, Maharaj had spent the previous three
years working to improve institutional food services in Toronto. At the Scarborough Hospital, for
example, she brought in local and sustainable ingredients, reintroduced cooking from scratch, and
reduced waste by making the meals more palatable and therefore more likely to be eaten. In
recent years, similar transformations have taken place at hospitals, long­term care facilities, and
universities across Canada and the U.S. With its food services contract soon to expire, Ryerson
wanted in.
Maharaj, who is the assistant director of food services and executive chef, helps the university’s
food services provider, Chartwells—the school­focused division of the U.K.­based corporation
Compass Group—source healthier ingredients from Toronto and surrounding areas. The university
works with a major company because of scale—it has to feed thousands of people a day.
However, the contract stipulates that 25 per cent of the food must be local and sustainable, a
percentage that is to increase two per cent annually for the next three years.
Which brings us to the cookies.
You know those big black plastic trays offered at meetings and events, featuring sliced fruit, ho­
hum muffins, and cookies the size of a saucer? Surprise, surprise, a lot go to waste. “The cookie
is really big and it was full of processed, garbage ingredients,” Maharaj says. “Plus it doesn’t taste
that good.” People only ate half, leaving the rest behind.
Those crumbs add up. The catering services that provide these snacks buy up to 30,000 cookies
a year, Maharaj estimates. “It’s 66 cents a cookie. That means 33 cents on every cookie is
getting wasted.” She asked suppliers to make a smaller cookie, but their big industrial baking
machines couldn’t adapt. This gave Maharaj the opportunity to think creatively. When she took the
job, one of her goals was to demonstrate how a large university could support small
businesses in the community. The challenge was to see if she could find a local supplier able to
bake enough cookies.
http://www.thegridto.com/life/food-drink/sweet-success/
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9/7/2014
Sweet success: How Ryerson is supporting T.O. businesses | The Grid TO
Maharaj approached pastry chef Andrea Mut, who had recently opened Andrea’s Gerrard St.
Bakery, a small shop near Broadview that sells coffee and sweets. And every week since
November, Mut has baked between 1,000 and 4,000 cookies for Ryerson. There’s spice ginger,
double chocolate, oatmeal raisin, flourless peanut butter chocolate chip, and chocolate chip. The
cookies are made with the same ingredients you’d use at home, like real butter—though spice
ginger is vegan (Mut uses vegetable to keep them chewy.) She buys the chocolate chips from
Chocosol, a local social enterprise that sources its cacao from forest gardens in Mexico. For
Valentine’s Day, she created a special cookie from locally milled flour.
Maharaj pays Mut the same amount as she did for the bigger cookies. The difference is they
contain higher quality ingredients and very few are left behind on the platter. For Mut, the
Ryerson gig is essential to staying open. “I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but it’s life or
death,” she says. “Having Ryerson take a tiny piece of their pie and give it to me makes a big
change [for my business’s health].” The order is big enough to make a difference but not so big
as to increase her costs.
Maharaj also has contracted about a dozen other local farmers and food businesses in the GTA
so far, which are now supplying items such as empanadas to Ryerson. For socially conscious
eaters, it’s a win­win. “Everyone on campus has fallen in love with those cookies,” Maharaj says.
Andrea’s Gerrard St. Bakery, 635 Gerrard St. E., andreasbakery635.com.
TA GS
Andrea's Gerrard St. Bakery, cookies, Eater's Digest, Joshna Maharaj, Ryerson University
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tommy
This is great and all, but the problem wont be solved until Compass/Eurest/Chartwells, Sodex Ho and
Aramark are all thrown to the curb. Their idea of food service is appalling.
7 0
5:53 pm on June 12, 2014
http://www.thegridto.com/life/food-drink/sweet-success/
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