About Crousset
A family business
How did the Crousset spice adventure begin?
Guillaume Crousset
President
To be frank, very humbly! Jacques, my father, started growing his own plants and herbs in his garden, behind his home.
It was in 2000. I joined him a few years later. I was living in Montreal at the time. My girlfriend and I, our family having just expanded with the arrival of our first daughter, were looking for a place to settle down, and it was quite natural that we turned to the magnificent Eastern Townships region.
I had studied business management and also worked for a few years in the overheated, greasy and suffocating kitchens of Montreal, and so with this knowledge I suggested to my father that I join him.
Arrived in the region
Newly arrived in the region, I absolutely needed a job. Like it’s in a hurry! Unfortunately, his herbal business barely allowed him to support himself. But thanks to various government supports and the addition of spices to the product range, we were able to get started.
Deal!
From the start, we agreed: I sell the spices and you make them. Deal! So I left with my suitcase full of samples to tour grocery stores and restaurants, looking for my first customers.
Hey boy! It wasn’t easy! I often passed for an extra-terrestrial with my ras el hanout, my garam masala and other Arabic and oriental mixtures. But we never gave up!
Over the years, by doing exhibitions and fairs, we ended up creating a name for ourselves. It took a long time, but hey, when you believe in it and have a pig’s head, it ends up paying off. Today we have diversified.
We offer our products and services to the agri-food industry, institutions, restaurants, grocery stores (under various private label names), microbreweries and distilleries. We’ve even managed to sell outside Quebec and Canada.
My wife has also joined our team to take charge of the marketing department. Getting the company to shine beyond the country’s borders is now one of our goals!
Throughout Canada, present inFrance
We are now present throughout Canada, as well as in France. For the rest, we have lots of great projects. We’ve doubled the production area of our Magog plant, and are in the process of obtaining SQF certification, one of the world’s highest quality and traceability standards. In short, we have many new challenges ahead of us in the not-too-distant future.
A few years ago…
The adventure began several years ago, at the turn of the year 2000. At the time, as Guillaume says in his intro, I was growing herbs in the more or less vast field behind my house, in Estrie. .
It wasn’t enough, of course, to sustain my wife and me, but we held on. Then, realizing that all this would not go very far, Quebec being still very small (and my field too, after all!), the idea came to me to add spices, of course from elsewhere , in my collection. Better than that: to make mixtures, taking inspiration from what was being done here and there.
Jacques Crousset
Vice-President, Founder
The horizon opened
From then on, things changed. The product offering was greater, the horizon was opening up. But there remained one problem, a huge problem: making yourself known. Because it was all well and good to arrive on the market with a whole range of rather new products, they still had to be sold. That is to say, convincing grocery stores, restaurateurs, and the public in general that what I was offering was beautiful and good. It hasn’t been easy, needless to say. I actually came out of nowhere, I was a complete stranger.
The trumpets of fame did not precede me. No one had seen me on television, no one had heard me on the radio. And I showed up with blends like Ethiopian Berber, Baharat, Madras curry, things that not many people knew.
But there was a way out, a way to make yourself known that didn’t cost too much: food shows, fairs. I believe, very humbly, that I have done them all, or pretty much all of them, in the company of my wife and Guillaume, who joined me a few years later.
Shop online
Prepare your stove! You can now order a selection of Crousset certified products online, to delight your taste buds!
