For Alxio Portales, founder of Passion for Desserts, a custom cookie manufacturing and wholesaler in Markham, it seems inevitable that baking would become more than a hobby. Born and raised in Venezuela, Portales worked as an engineer for a decade after university. “I went home every night and I had to bake… that was my outlet – my release… my thing that made me happy.”
Shortly after immigrating to Canada, Portales and her husband had their second child. They were living in Kingston at the time and Portales was working for Bell. They knew no one and were balancing a new life in a new country with the introduction of a second child. Once again, she turned to baking as an outlet.
But it became more than that. Portales decided she wasn’t going to return to work after her maternity leave. Instead, she began to plot out the idea for a Latin American bakery, an early iteration of Passion for Desserts.
She was on the cusp of registering the business in Kingston when her husband got a new job requiring a relocation to Markham. That move laid the foundation for what Passion for Desserts is today.
Within months of moving to the Cornell neighbourhood in Markham in 2006, Portales connected with the Markham small business centre. “I knew nothing,” says the baker. The team helped her register the business and she began attending workshops, trying to build her expertise beyond baking into entrepreneurship.
“We always felt that sense of community… I found a lot of support with the initial concept for the business,” says Portales. “I would attend local events and the picnics in my neighbourhood… a lot of the ideas and the first orders came from my Cornell community.”
Over the next seven years, Portales built the business out of her health unit-approved kitchen space in her home before expanding into a brick-and-mortar space around 2013.
The custom cookie side of the business gained traction, and Passion for Desserts pivoted to focus efforts on custom cookies for events and corporate orders for Markham businesses looking to put their logos on cookies. During the pandemic – with so many of the corporate clients and events pausing orders – Passions for Desserts leaned into the wholesale side of the business.
Today, Passion for Desserts is a leader in the custom cookie business, using innovative techniques like 3D printing to design unique creations and producing white-labelled lines of cookies for stores from coast to coast in Canada.
“Anything extremely customized or weird that you need on a cookie, we can do it,” says Portales. The cookie manufacturer has made brain shaped cookies for the University of Toronto and liver shaped cookies for the Liver Association, perfume bottle replica cookie for Dior Canada and highly customized hockey jerseys for a wedding etc.
They just wrapped a massive order for the Markham hospital, a run of cookies with QR codes that employees could scan for a breakdown of the company’s latest marketing plan. “We’ve been doing cookies for the Markham hospital since day one,” says Portales.
Passion for Desserts owner says that level of support from local businesses has allowed them to explore their craft as a cookie manufacturer. “Because we’re a small company, we’re very flexible,” she says. “It’s allowed us to be creative.”
She admits the business is still recovering from the drop-off that occurred during COVID but, just like when she was first started the business, she’s looked to Markham initiatives to help raise her business’s profile and build on what she’s spent 18 years creating.
And Markham will continue to play a big role in that. “Everything I needed, I found it here through the support of the local community,” says Portales.
