Haika Powell has been in the food industry for more than 20 years. She loves food. If you look up “foody” in the dictionary, it probably has her picture next to the definition. Haika owns over 900 cookbooks and has read each one of them. One thing she has learned from all of this experience is that the best foods are made with the best ingredients. Not one of her many cookbooks contain a recipe that calls for pesticides, herbicides or antibiotics.
 
You may be wondering just what “whole foods” means. Whole foods:  foods in as close to their natural state as possible, that is, they have not had any of their natural features taken away or any artificial substances added.

Our ingredients are 75 +/- % organic all the time. As a small business we face some limitations. Certain ingredients, such as nuts, are prohibitively expensive and difficult to get reliably in quantity. We have already experienced times when our purveyors could not provide butter or eggs because the demand outstripped the supply that week, and as a small customer we were not a priority. This means we occasionally have to purchase these products from more expensive sources, running up our cost or replace them with non-organic ingredients.

We have established a hierarchy for our purchasing: When we can’t get an organic, locally produced product we get an organic one from where ever we can find it. Failing that, we accept the non-organic one from a local source that we can verify uses sustainable agriculture practices. Many of the local farmers we deal with are not certified organic, but do follow organic and sustainable agriculture practices.

Going the extra mile to use organic is all worth while when you experience the flavors. Nothing makes a croissant more flavorful than European style cultured organic butter. Fresh picked, local peaches just burst with flavor when made into fruit cobbler or pies. The yolks of the eggs we get from the local farmer (who lets his chickens roam free) are so rich in color and texture that they make our cheesecakes turn orange.

For your convenience below we created guides to the ingredients for those seeking all organic or vegan items.

Ingredients that ARE organic: All of our dairy – milk, cream cheese, sour cream, heavy cream, butter, buttermilk; all of our cooking oil, all of the flour, all of the sugar we use for baking, limited food coloring for decorating, meat, chocolate and many vegetables

Ingredients that are NOT organic: Nuts, dried fruits, in season fruit (we look for local low spray fruit), most food coloring for decorating

Products that are made with all organic ingredients (although not all ingredients are certified organic): Croissants, cheesecake, celebration cakes (excluding decorations), breads, pudding (chocolate & rice)

We do offer several vegan products: All of our fruit pies, one type of celebration cake and several of our specialty cakes and many soups.

All other products use some combination of organic, sustainably sourced, and/or top quality ingredients.