Wolfgang Puck's Executive Chef Brad Gates Adds Hickory Syrup To Menu Flow

Press Release 05/16/05
Wolfgang Puck's Executive Chef Brad Gates adds Hickory Syrup to the menu flow at the new PUCK'S restaurant in Indianapolis.

Syrup seeped in distinction
Trafalgar, Indiana

At first glance, the story of Hickoryworks Hickory syrup in Trafalgar, Indiana, sounds like a business fairy tale: A chance meeting with a mysterious stranger leads to acquisition of a secret recipe that results in a national gourmet goldmine. But chat with owner Gordon Jones and his real recipe for success comes through: Passion for a unique product, savvy marketing and public relations, and keeping things small, hands-on and fun instead of falling into the "bigger is better" conventional mindset.

With roots and decades of experience in the corporate world of sales, advertising and management, Gordon and his wife, Sherrie Yarling, a seventeen year paralegal, escaped the white-collar career track in 1990 and built a secluded log cabin on 64 acres of Sherrie's family land of rolling hills about 30 miles south of Indianapolis. "We first grew and sold shiitake mushrooms, thinking that this would be a unique, high end product that local premium restaurants would be interested ," explains Gordon. "We started cold-calling area chefs and developing relationships and sales interest," explains Gordon. While gaining a following, the couple realized that shiitakes have a short, unpredictable growing season and required labor-intensive lifting and moving of the logs where the mushrooms grow.

Then came a chance roadside encounter with a mysterious stranger. While Gordon and Sherrie were working up downed trees on their land, an old man pulled up and asked if he could buy some firewood. Noticing a shagbark hickory tree nearby, the man told Gordon of a unique syrup his great, great grandmother made from the bark of such trees. Striking a deal with this man to give him free firewood, he reappeared a few weeks later with the tattered recipe on yellowed parchment, a piece of paper Gordon and Sherrie protect like gold today since they are the only two who fully know its contents. "It makes me feel a little like Colonel Sanders with a secret recipe," Gordon says with a smile, adding that business has grown one hundred percent every year since the company's founding in 1991.

Hickoryworks hickory syrup is extracted from the bark of the shagbark hickory tree through a process of heating Gordon describes as "a combination between a wok and a pressure cooker to render the extract, which is then cooled and aged like a fine wine. The whole process takes about three and a half weeks." Different from maple syrup, hickory syrup doesn't use tree sap. Rather, it's a sugar syrup flavored with extract from the tree bark.

The unique flavor and versatility of shagbark syrup prompted Gordon and Sherrie to embark on a targeted marketing effort to upscale chefs, sending free samples and asking for their comments and recipes. These, in turn, became free product endorsements to post on the growing Hickoryworks' website. Drawing first on the area Indiana chefs with whom they had already developed a relationship through their mushrooms sales, Gordon read various culinary and food trade publications such as Food Arts, Packaging Digest and Gourmet magazine looking for names of up-and-coming chefs to send a Hickoryworks sample to.

Chefs raved about the uniqueness and versatility of Hickoryworks Hickory syrup, using it on almost anything calling for sugar or maple syrup, such as glazes over beef, pork, chicken or fish, as well as a drink mixer and in salad dressing. It's also been used as an ingredient in bakery goods or served straight over ice cream and pancakes. Tim Mally, then executive chef at Ye Olde' Library Restaurant in Carmel, Indiana, gave a testimonial in the spirit of other devoted chefs: "It's one of the mos