Today we’d like to introduce you to Patricia Erd.
Patricia, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Our company was founded by my parents, Ruth and Bill Penzey, Sr. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1957, thus we are second generation spice merchants.
I grew up working in the shop for my allowance! My parents sold the business to my husband, Tom Erd, and me, in 1992 as they looked toward retirement. They had also completed their lease in downtown Milwaukee, and had no desire to build out another storefront. My husband Tom was eager to take on this task, and we moved our shop across the street on Old World Third Street, a building we now own. The credit for the creation of The Spice House, its principles and its dedication to quality, goes wholeheartedly to Ruth and Bill Penzey, Sr.
As is normal in the next generation taking over, we wanted to take the company a bit further, honor the dedication to its principles, but put our own mark on the company.
We opened the second Spice House in Evanston, Illinois in 1996, close enough to home and parental business consulting to be comfortable, yet far enough to feel it was our own adventure. The opening of the shop in Evanston had really nice coverage by both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun Times. Wonderful things happened in this new venture, including receiving the Evanston Small Business of the Year award in the year 2000 and a really nice morning segment on FOX news, which served to organically introduce us to many new cooks in the Chicago area…
The business continued to grow. To get the word out, we became members of wonderful organizations involved in the culinary arts, and participated in many programs combining restaurateurs and chefs with educational spice programs. We tried to do as much public speaking about spices as possible including speaking for the Culinary Historians of Chicago, Slow Food, and Les Dames d’Escoffier. We were selected by the American Institute of Food and Wine as participants in the Best of the Midwest Festival.
We were on the circuit tour as educators for the AIWF, although our daily duties as shopkeepers limited us to mostly events in the Midwest. We lectured regularly at Kendall Culinary College in Evanston, and then later, in the city when the college moved there… Alton Brown taped a segment in the Evanston shop called “It’s a Wonderful Cake” which fortuitously was about fruitcake and continues to air over the holidays even 20 years!
The “real” Chicago store we had dreamed about for many years while we operated only the Milwaukee shop opened in 2001. In 2002, we won the prestigious Good Eating award from The Chicago Tribune food section. We continue to have wonderful educational lecturing opportunities including the Newberry Library, the DePaul Geographical Society and many culinary colleges. We had radio interviews with WGN’s Dean Richards and Rick Kogan. We did several really nice interviews with Michele Norris on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. I was featured as the spice expert on a new PBS show, Real Simple. I also served as a spice expert at an IACP conference in Chicago. I was greatly honored to sit on a panel with Madhur Jaffrey, Jill Norman and Nina Simmonds, some of the top spice experts in the world! Our biggest honor was to be chosen on the short list of World’s Best Spice Shops by Food and Wine Magazine in 2013.
All of this marvelous press over the years has kept us going and growing. We have been very fortunate in that respect. We would like to think that our hard work and dedication to sourcing the finest quality spices in the world and then taken the utmost care in the grinding of them and mixing them into seasonings fresh weekly also has a little something to do with it!
Has it been a smooth road?
I doubt any small business owner would tell you it was a smooth road! We have always tried to grow at a pace we were comfortable with, which to us means we never borrowed money.
We have five locations, and we saved for a period of years between each location to better afford it without going into debt. We really want to be all about our passion, which is our spice products, but it is just not enough in this day and age to focus on a single area of expertise. As small business owners, we wear many hats that are not all that comfortable to us. We are spice merchants, that we understand, but all the other things, such as SEO, SEM, social media, insurance, human resources, accounting, tax issues, etc. can really drain one’s creativity for their craft.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Our philosophy, as taught to us carefully by my parents, has always been to make you the freshest product by small, weekly batch grinding to ensure you the highest quality spices. We then mix our seasonings up by hand, using these freshly ground spices, in small artisanal batches about once a week.
We import spices from many countries of origin which have the highest recommendations for premium quality. Often, we offer several selections of origin so that you can sample the subtle variations and decide upon your own personal preference. We offer one of the deepest products lines you will find in the country for herbs, spices and seasonings, with over 600 products. The tools of our trade are a series of large stainless-steel scoops, mixing bowls, sifting screens of various mesh sizes, a small vibrating sifter, a collection of old-style stone and shearing mills, and most importantly, our human senses. Our customers are everyone from the new cook just leaving home to live in their own place for the first time, to four stars chefs across the country. We love to share our decades of spice knowledge with anyone who loves to cook.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
The area of Old Town in the city of Chicago was a stretch for us. In fact, we fell in love with the location because it looked so much like our original Milwaukee location. My husband and I wrote the top number we could afford on a piece of paper. The agreement was that when the realtor showed it to us, if the price was above that number, we would walk away. It was and we didn’t! Deciding on a place with your heart and not your head is not a good way to make a business decision. If this had been our first location, we would have failed.
Fortunately, it was our third location, and we had many years in business to build our customer base. The fact that the location also put us much closer to many restaurants was a huge boon to our wholesale business. My husband in particular worked with many Chicago chefs to help them create custom blends, which was not an area of business that we had really foreseen. A new small business really needs to be in a place where they can afford the rent.
Unfortunately, there are very few areas of Chicago that lend themselves to an affordable rent for an independently owned small business. And that is not a criticism of the city, it is just going to be that way when so many people live in such a small geographical area. Our advice would be when starting out that you have enough saved that you can pay your rent for at least a year without going into debt. Yet we have always done things the old fashioned way, I guess that was our upbringing. And, we like to be able to sleep at night!
Contact Info:
- Address: 1512 North Wells Street, Chicago, Il 60610
1941 Central Street, Evanston, Il 60201
1031 North Old World Third Street, Milwaukee, Wis. 53203
Milwaukee Public Market, 400 North Water Street, Milwaukee, Wi. 53202 - Website: www.thespicehouse.com
- Phone: 312 676 2414
- Email: spices@thespicehouse.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespicehousechicago/
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/thespicehouse
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheSpiceHouse
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-spice-house-chicago
- Other: http://pinterest.com/thespicehouse/
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