Working smarter, not harder: health and wellness is the baseline of business for Lannie Rae Gourmet
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BY LUCY HAINES PHOTOS BY LANNIE RAE GOURMET
or Alannah Gamblin-Jensen, running a Banff bakery that led to a growing online business of baking mixes (pancakes/waffles, beer bread, and scones), shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, the determined, accidental entrepreneur says she’s always made the best of whatever life has thrown at her. That includes a long ago move west from her native Labrador, helping out in-laws and eventually taking over a busy Banff bakeshop, (cookies, cakes and loaves, catering and more) and then creating the home-grown online site, Lannie Rae Gourmet. If that wasn’t enough, GamblinJensen has done it while raising a young family in Cochrane and dealing with an old skiing injury that led to a sometimesdebilitating diagnosis. Gamblin-Jensen’s touch is evident across a website of high-end pancake/ waffle mixes and more; a boutique-type collection of flavours like pear frangipane, pistachio and fig, and pumpkin crème
20 Culinaire | December 2023
brulée, to name a few. Add eggs and milk and voila, you’re in business: think Williams Sonoma, with a Canadian twist. Even though the young Gamblin baked with her mom as a youngster, she says she couldn’t have foreseen adding catering or specialty baking to the early days of her journey, but it’s what happened. Special occasion cakes? Sure. Catering breakfasts, adding lunchtime soups and sandwiches? Why not? “We baked a ton - I made 2,000 cupcakes in one day,” Gamblin-Jensen recalls of early days working with husband Trevor at the Banff operation, even as he kept another day job. “I’m stubborn. When someone asked me to bake an Eeyore cake for a birthday, it made me determined to figure out how to do it.” That ‘let’s give it a try’ attitude has served the marketing-savvy entrepreneur well. When the retail business was slowing, Gamblin-Jensen started selling dry mixes of scones and cookies along with packages
of cake decorations, tubs of icing/fondant etc. at take-and-bake pricing. Before closing up the bricks and mortar operation in about 2010, she also fortuitously held onto baking equipment and recipes. “I filled the shelves with bags of mixes; the concept was a hit,” says Gamblin-Jensen. Though Lannie Rae Gourmet was still just a percolating idea, life came calling. After the birth of her second child, daughter Evynne, Gamblin-Jensen fell ill with what eventually was diagnosed as the autoimmune disorder, Hashimoto’s Disease (and the discovery that her back problems were due to a broken back from a skiing injury years earlier). “I don’t think the word defeat is in her vocabulary,” said friend and eventual Lannie Rae operations staffer Kerri Dance, who went from helping Gamblin-Jensen package and send product to assistance with drawing up a business plan for the company.
