Gray Goose Cookery: Kitchen Store With a Mission

Suzanne Lane has come full circle with her weight loss journey and kitchenware store. It was the store she turned to for tools when she first began the journey to lose the 118 pounds she has lost so far. Now the journey is a main focus of the store, and she’s not done yet. At the Gray Goose Cookery in Mystic, Connecticut, Lane is not only the proprietor, she is the leading the charge for a healthy lifestyle in her community by encouraging others to learn about her journey and do the same with some help from herself and her kitchenware store.

“Here I am in the food industry, and we always talk about food. It’s so easy to end up eating more than you should, and I put on a lot of weight over the years,” says Lane. “I decided to turn to my kitchen store and use the tools in my kitchen store to lose weight. I researched all the diets, and I created my own diet, and I did it. I followed my own diet, and I lost all this weight.”

From there, Lane had people approaching her and asking how she had done it. She followed the logical steps and decided to offer classes in her store to share her healthy-eating tips with others and The Pinch Diet was born. The premise is basic: healthy eating, exercise and just a pinch of temptation foods here and there to satisfy cravings while not giving in to them entirely.

Coming from a culinary background, Lane has knowledge of food and food preparation that she is able to share with others who might be less inclined to find the joy in a salad on their own. A family of “foodies,” as she calls it, her mother and grandfather were both avid home cooks, and Lane herself managed several restaurants for two years in between her undergraduate and graduate degrees, even becoming chef within just six months.

She eventually opened a gift store but had customers asking her to get kitchen tools for them, so a kitchenware store seemed a natural transition. She had designed a logo for her retired mother to use for a catering company that was to be called Gray Goose Catering. When that fell through and Lane was ready to open up for business, she decided to use the logo she had already personally designed, and Gray Goose Cookery was born in 1995.

The shop is 4,000 square feet located in Olde Mistick Village, a shopping district built to recall New England’s colonial era. With the Mystic Aquarium just down the road and the Mystic Seaport about a half mile away, the store sees lots of tourists coming through during the summer months and enjoys local business throughout the year.

Lane also has a gift store, Elizabeth & Harriet, and a tabletop store, Gray Goose, Too, both located in Olde Mistick Village as well. She opened up Gray Goose, Too in 2005 after finding she had run out of room at Gray Goose Cookery. She also realized that tabletop items need a different sort of display than do kitchenwares and that they attracted a different sort of customer — one who tends to set the table rather than cook the food. In Mystic, the leisure set is big, given that the Mystic River is just right there, and folks need those entertaining pieces for their boats, poolside and al fresco dining. Gray Goose, Too is an entirely separate shop of 2,500 square feet located across the way from Gray Goose Cookery.

The product selection at Gray Goose Cookery is a reflection of what Mystic customers want. A combination of Baby Boomers and Millennials who are gadget-oriented with an eye on ease of use has lent itself well to the purpose of showcasing healthy eating tactics within the store.

“Boomers and Millennials are really driving the marketplace, and that’s how we got somewhat into the healthy eating component,” says Lane. “The Millennials are coming in because we’re talking the language that they’re concerned about. They don’t want to eat all this processed food; they want to get back to the basics also.”

Whether it’s in her Pinch Diet classes or simply helping a customer in the store, Lane never misses an opportunity to share a healthy eating tidbit. If a customer is selecting an ice cream scoop, she will point out that the tool can also be used as a portion control scoop.

“Over the course of time I’ve shared what I’ve learned with my staff, and my staff has shared what I’ve passed on to them with the customers to educate the customers,” says Lane. “Our staff does add those healthy eating suggestions to people to educate our customer. Our customer needs to know more because this country is suffering from a major caloric imbalance. They’re eating more than they’re expending, so we’re trying to educate our people more and more.”

The planting of healthy eating seeds among customers combined with The Pinch Diet Classes, has over the last year and a half begun to attract people to the store specifically seeking out the advice they know they can find at Gray Goose Cookery. The classes are bringing in diabetics and pre-diabetics, folks who have been warned by their doctors that they need to make changes in their lives before their health takes an irrevocable turn. Lane recounts the story of a customer who needed to lose 10 pounds before having a knee replacement surgery. She stuck to The Pinch Diet and lost 15 pounds before her procedure, making for an easier recovery.

“I’m a figure in the community, literally and figuratively, and when they see me it’s like, ‘Wow, you look fabulous!’ So I’ve sort of become a beacon for people to come along and help themselves,” says Lane. “Now we’ve become the go-to place where they can get in touch with being healthier … even in the little ways of buying that Mastrad spiral vegetable slicer. There are little tools that can make it more interesting when you’re trying to control your weight or your caloric intake. That’s one of the key things that I’ve taught people in my classes. Life is to be lived — enjoy it and make it interesting.”

With nearly 70 percent of adult Americans overweight or obese and the weight loss industry valued at around $60 million in 2014, Lane points out that there is a major opportunity for kitchenware retailers to get on board with educating their customers and garner a portion of the weight loss market. She spoke to 200 members of Gourmet Catalog & Buying Group in Atlanta at AmericasMart this January on the topic of how retailers can position themselves to become a valuable resource to help communities achieve healthy lifestyle goals.

Fellow retailers can do so very simply, Lane says, just by adding in the healthy eating mantra and teaching customers and staff to look at products through an alternative lens. A SodaStream can be used to make sparkling water with muddled lemon added to replace a favorite cocktail or soda and add more water to the diet at the same time, for example. If a customer is considering a Silpat for cookies, let them know about healthy snacks they can make with it too — like chocolate covered oatmeal and Craisins for a preservative-free treat. Gray Goose Cookery carries Dizzy Pig BBQ rubs and Ariston infused olive oils, both of which are healthy ways to add flavor to a meal while lowering fat.

“It doesn’t have to be complicated. Simple healthy foods are where we should be going with this initiative in our industry,” says Lane. “There’s a huge opportunity for us to grow our businesses. We just need to be able to suggest it and then it’ll become practice for people; they’ll be thinking about it more, and it will make sense to them.”

This story was originally published in the March 2015 issue of Kitchenware News, a publication of Oser Communications Group.