AMAZING DUMPLINGS — HONEST!
Market vendor looks to expand
It looks, on the surface, like a booth selling dumplings. A closer examination, however, reveals more.
Honest Dumplings, appearing at the Callingwood market for the first time this season, is a classic YEG success story on several levels. A new Canadian falls in love with both the country and one of its inhabitants, and together they create an upstart business reflecting a near-perfect merger of old and new world. And then they birth a baby to boot.
I first met Ray Ma and Chris Lerohl nearly two years ago when they had a pop-up to promote their new venture — a line of Chineseinspired dumplings featuring highquality, often local and organic ingredients. At the time, Ma was the only one working full-time to produce the delicious nuggets. Lerohl was working at TEC Edmonton, a consultant for startups in the technology sector.
Ma’s decision to start the business was rooted in her immigration experience. She came to Canada from Shanghai to study law roughly eight years ago. Once here, Ma says she became a different person. She had been raised in the competitive Chinese culture where parents often pressure their children to become doctors or lawyers and to make a lot of money. In Canada, she saw that many people didn’t follow the path that their parents set out for them. Some Canadians followed their passion, and created jobs out of that.
Ma’s passion was food. She was used to eating dumplings in China, stuffed with delicious and intriguing ingredients, and saw a niche in the Edmonton marketplace for a gourmet product. By now, she was married to Lerohl. With his business experience, and her love of food, they created Honest Dumplings.
In the beginning, Ma was handmaking some 2,000 dumplings a week out of her kitchen and selling them at three markets, and through the grocery delivery service SPUD. It went well, and Lerohl began to dream of scaling up the business and turning it into something fulltime for both of them. Recently, he quit his job at TEC Edmonton and is now devoting himself to Honest Dumplings, researching equipment (they found something perfect in Japan) that would produce more dumplings while still maintaining the integrity and honesty of their product.
“We went down to the U.S. to a fancy food show in San Francisco and saw there wasn’t much out there in gourmet dumplings like ours. So we saw a niche opportunity and got excited about that and what this company could look like,” says Lerohl.
There are eight core flavours in the line, including several vegan options, from kale, ginger and shiitake to curry cauliflower with tarragon. Their carnivore variety pack features maple pork belly, Sichuan chicken and ginger beef and traditional pork. There are no fillers, preservatives, MSG, artificial colourings or flavourings in Honest Dumplings.
They now also have a spot at the St. Albert Farmers’ Market, among others, and are there with eightmonth-old Darwin in tow. Lerohl says they’re now producing up to 5,000 dumplings a week. In the early days, Honest Dumplings were sold in plain freezer bags. Now, Lerohl and Ma are polishing the brand, creating proper labels, brochures and banners.
“We’re both really loving it, especially now that we are both in it,” says Lerohl. “And even with (the baby), we work the farmers market, and he’s with us and it’s still quality time.”