Honest Dumplings
Revolutionize Alberta Grocery Stores’ Freezer Section One Dumpling at a Time BY ELIZABETH CHORNEY-BOOTH
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ometimes the best products aren’t born out of a plan for culinary dominance, but an entrepreneur’s simple desire to be able to buy a product that just doesn’t seem to be available in the existing market. Originally from Shanghai, Edmontonian Ray Ma was disappointed with the selection of packaged dumplings in her local grocery stores. None of them were particularly tasty, and most were full of less-than-ideal ingredients. Ma was making her own dumplings at home, filled with 20 Culinaire | January/February 2021
interesting combinations of flavours and ingredients and thought that other dumpling lovers might want to give them a try. In 2014 Ma was working as a lawyer and her partner Chris Lerohl had a job in tech, but they knew they wanted to see how well Ma’s dumplings would sell. Ma quit her job to shift to dumplings full time, and the couple tested the waters by selling bags of dumplings at a farmers’ market. They quickly realized that the gap in the market that Ma felt with her dumpling cravings was shared by others in
Edmonton. “When we started we didn’t even know what a commercial kitchen was,” Lerohl says. “We had to figure out a lot of things really quickly.” The farmers’ market was a success, and before long Ma and Lerohl were also doing pop-up events in Edmonton. They named their venture Honest Dumplings after their commitment to transparency and quality when it comes to their ingredients — even the dumplings’ brightly coloured wrappers are dyed with natural vegetable juices. Both the markets and the pop-ups were a hit and before long, Lerohl and Ma set their sights on something bigger; they attended a food show in California and became convinced that there was a place for their dumplings in mainstream grocery stores. “We got really inspired and knew that was where we wanted to take our product,” Lerohl says. “The grocery game is really changing and we knew that we could bring a disruption to that category, and bring a different kind of customer experience to that market. And that’s when we really pivoted into being a grocery food company.” Lerohl and Ma got to working not only on developing relationships with stores, but also on new packaging and marketing to appeal to shoppers rushing through grocery store aisles. Without the opportunity to have that one-on-one interaction with their customers that they had in the farmers’ market, after some trial and error the pair worked with an agency to come up with a look that would convey Honest Dumpling’s personality from within a freezer case.
