Meet Spencer Stackhouse of On Tap Kitchen in Broomfield

Today we’d like to introduce you to Spencer Stackhouse.

Spencer, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My culinary journey really began just after graduating from college and moving to New York City. Prior to that, my course studying Arabic took me abroad to Syria several times, broadening my palate and interest in food dramatically from a pretty finicky middle American eater to someone much more curious and open. In 2010, I enrolled in a professional culinary school in Manhattan while working in a variety of restaurant and catering jobs. The move back home to Colorado after five years in NY was partially motivated by the booming food scene that has grown here since I moved east. With my professional experience primarily being restaurant kitchens, the move to the CPG space where On Tap Kitchen is situated was inspired by some experience working for other local start ups in the Boulder area upon my return. I really enjoyed the diverse challenges associated with starting a business while also being afforded the ability to continue working in a kitchen regularly. It’s a great combination of work that’s kept me busy and motivated for over four years now.

The idea for pretzels, both crunchy and soft, destined for breweries, was of course born in a brewery. There has been a revolution in the snack food aisle, bringing in snacks made with better quality ingredients and smaller batch sizes. Pretzels seemed to be one of the only classic American snack items lacking a quality alternative to the big brands. With Colorado’s breweries as an obvious starting point, we’ve been working to make our product just that. We’ve grown from working with a handful of local breweries to some of the biggest in the state as well as a variety of other retailers from groceries to restaurants to gift shops. We now have our own kitchen and three employees working to help make our products. We’re continuing to expand organically and we really value that approach–building solid relationships has been a priority of ours since the beginning and has yielded great results and lots of new friendships.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The biggest struggle for some time was securing an affordable and accessible place to make our product. There are very limited options for small food start ups like ours without mounds of funding available for renting time and/or equipment. It took a few years of struggling with the limitations of the space we could find before we were able to justify the cost of building out our own kitchen instead of continuing to rent in a commissary. Of course, this struggle makes us appreciate our own dedicated kitchen that much more and inspires us to try new and different things on the regular, simply because we have the time and space to do it!

The second struggle that I’ve been dealing with as a boss and just in general as a business, is staffing. Finding people that are consistent and reliable has been a real challenge. Kitchen work isn’t very lucrative and it is physical and tiring, all of which makes it that much more difficult to attract good folks, even if the work is straightforward and the coworkers are great! The other side of this has been learning to be the boss and the personal and management traits needed to manage not only staff but also the day to day requirements of the business. Fortunately, we’ve found some great team members recently after having a pretty tumultuous summer and that’s definitely helped take some of the pressure off for now. It really helps to be an organized person by nature since it affords me the time to keep learning and working on my ability to lead our staff! It’s definitely a struggle learning to let go though and trust someone with the reins of something you’ve worked hard to build — but it must be done and it’s an important part of growing personally and as a business for our employees to feel ownership and pride in their work.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
We hand make both soft and crunchy pretzels from Colorado-grown ingredients that are now pretty well-known for being available in many of Colorado’s brewery taprooms. I’m proud of our partnerships with so many other small & independent businesses in Colorado–it’s been the foundation of our business but also a great community of people to get to know and learn from. Many are brands and products I’ve often enjoyed before starting On Tap Kitchen and I couldn’t be luckier to be able to work with and learn from them as a fellow business owner. I’m also proud of the ingredients we’ve been able to source, our organic wheat flour is grown and milled in Colorado as is our sunflower oil, meaning almost all of the pretzel comes from Colorado farms and processors!

Aside from the ingredients, our traditional technique also sets us apart — we make classic soft pretzels first and then break them up and bake them again. They have a unique crispy and airy texture that even makes pretzel-skeptics into pretzel-fans. We’ve found that lots of folks have written off pretzels since they are often the extruded stick kind made by the big brands, so our product has helped bring more naysayers back into the pretzel-enjoying fold. People saying, “I don’t usually like pretzels, but I like these!” is something heard regularly at our Boulder Farmer’s Market booth — I know the feeling because I don’t really like most of the other pretzels out there either!

What were you like growing up?
I was a pretty average middle child, I had a younger sister to tease and an older brother to mimic. I was definitely a very picky eater and a reluctant participant in team sports until high school when I shed them in favor of nerding out on the debate team. Unsurprisingly then, I was an excellent student and enjoyed the social and academic experience of school probably more than most. Until I decided I was too old and cool (so about 15) to run around with the neighborhood gang of kids, I was usually doing just that or in a basement playing video games with the same while not in class. I could be bashful but was overall pretty social and talkative, forming friendships easily, many of which are still intact today. I was never a fan of manual labor or kitchen work — something that changed as I grew up. I always loved eating though so maybe that’s the thread that brought me to where I am today. Of course, I still love to eat, I just have a much broader range of things that I seek out than I did 10, 15, or 20 years ago!

Pricing:

• 3.5oz packages of our pretzels retail for 3-4$
• 7oz packages retail for 5-6$

Contact Info:

• Address: 555 Burbank St Unit A Broomfield CO 80020
• Website: ontapkitchen.com
• Phone: 6467172425
• Email: info@ontapkitchen.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/ontapkitchen
• Facebook: facebook.com/ontapkitchen
• Twitter: twitter.com/ontapkitchen

Image Credit:
Stephen Devries Photo

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