We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tracy Dempsey. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tracy below.

Tracy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you take vacations? Why or why not?

Vacations or time away are important. I have managed to take a few over the years. I find it requires a considerable amount of planning and organizing. In the early days of owning my business, it was very challenging because I was the primary point of contact as well as the invoice maker so I needed to be in touch with my production crew on a daily basis. That was stressful. As things changed, I was able to hire a more experienced and mature person in my kitchen who could manage the day-to-day needs of the business without me being in contact every day. Last year, we decided to close up shop for two weeks, so we could all take time away from the business. Trusted friends visited the kitchen and shop every few days to collect mail and check that everything was still running- coolers, freezers, AC units, etc. It was the best decision we’ve made in years and we will do it again this year. While I am not a good vacationer as I do enjoy staying busy and my work is very enjoyable to me. I have learned to accept my shortcomings as a vacationer and find pleasure in doing small projects that usually involve baking and playing with ingredient which is what I do for my work. Every business owner owes it themself to take time off even if that means staying home for a few days. I always return ready to get back in the kitchen and I feel my level of creativity improves.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I was a language instructor prior to taking the plunge into the culinary world over 20+ years ago. I left teaching to attend a culinary program at the local community college and from there worked a number of restaurant and resort jobs to gain experience. I was most interested in pastry and desserts, so I pursued job opportunities to that end. I was lucky to work in a number of well-reputed, creative Valley restaurants that afforded me the chance to experiment and find my own style of desserts which was focused on combining sweet and savory components to create a more balanced and complementary ending to a meal. After working in a number of restaurants, I decided to go out on my own (this was also prompted by the economic downturn we experienced around 2008) and wound up making desserts for a number of restaurants that had either let go of or that had made the decision to not hire an in-house pastry chef. I rented the kitchen of a local restaurant that was open for breakfast and lunch only, so I had use of the kitchen in the evenings and would then make deliveries the following morning. My original plan had been to open a dessert bar, but the economy being what it was meant having to pivot (something I would do again during Covid), and so I found myself with a beast of a wholesale dessert business. I soon outgrew the kitchen I was using and needed to find my own space and hire pastry cooks to assist.
Today, my business is again different. I have a smaller kitchen team, I scaled back on the number of wholesale accounts I would serve to preserve the quality of the product going out, we opened a retail bakery and wine shop, and today we host a thriving CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) working with a coop that represents a number of local farmers and growers, and we started a wine club.
I am most proud of the community we’ve built. Our customers are like family and the interesting times we all endured during Covid brought us together even more. I’m proud of the desserts we make, the wines we select, the people on my team, but without the support of our community, we wouldn’t be here.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

We send a monthly newsletter detailing upcoming events and classes to our distribution list that we’ve built over 10 years. In addition, with the help of a friend who works in PR, we maintain daily SM posts. Many of my customers know they can reach me via text and email and they do. I make sure to step out of the kitchen and visit customers in the shop on the days we are open. They also know they can pop over to the kitchen to say hi and see what’s going on.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

In the early years of running my business, I hired a good many young culinary students with zero experience. There were some real starts among them, but there were a lot of bad hires, too. The former teacher in me lost sight of the fact she was running and growing a business and not a school. Once I hired people with experience and maturity, things improved. I had to learn to put my business first and the education of these young hires had to be tempered with my putting forth the expectations of the business- this is a job NOT school. I had to learn to let go or fire people instead of hoping they’d learn and not repeat the same mistake. It was a very hard lesson to learn and I wish I’d learned it sooner.

Contact Info:

• Website: tracy@tracydempseyoriginals.com
• Instagram: tdo_odv
• Facebook: tdoriginalsandodvwines
• Youtube: @tracydempseyoriginals3120
• Yelp: Tracy Dempsey Originals