Sweet Flight Of Fancy

Ontario cookie producer combines traditional handmade recipes and attractive packaging presentation to fill a growing and promising market niche for vintage pastries.You’ve got to be one pretty smart cookie to make the grade as a relative newcomer to the
crowded and fiercely competitive market for cookies and sweet pastries nowadays, and happily for the Aurora, Ont.-based Cookie It Up, the company’s owner Shane Smith is a shrewd operator of the highest caliber.Which makes him a perfect fit to steer the cookie
business he purchased three years ago—after working for 18 years in the fast-paced information technology business through its next phase of organic growth in a thoughtful and measured way befitting the company’s unique local history and following.Founded in 1983 by local budding entrepreneur Paige Sillcox as a DIY summer job project while pursuing her undergraduate studies at the York University in northern Toronto, the home kitchen enterprise quickly evolved into a full-time venture that was selling about 800 bags of fresh handmade cookies to local residents and business per week by the end of that first summer.“I remember eating those delicious cookies during my high-school years here in Aurora,” says Smith, a Calgary native who spent most of his youth growing up in this picturesque community a short drive north of Toronto, before enrolling into the University of Western Ontario’s renowned Richard Ivey School of Business in London, Ont.