in her SODO production kitchen, Jane Yuan is reinventing the cracker
STORY BY EMILY HORTON
PHOTOS BY JIM HENKENS AND ANNIE BRADY
Most of us have a few memories of a meal or a dish that stand out, vivid, even when we’ve forgotten everything else around it. We may not remember the details, but we know that moment changed things—and spoiled us for anything similar. For Jane Yuan, former publicist and founder of Seattle-based Simple & Crisp, the idea of a life-changing meal isn’t hyperbole.
Several years ago, Yuan was having dinner in at a restaurant in Los Angeles, where she was living at the time, when a feature of the dessert course—a thin, candied orange slice—caught her off guard. The flavor was intense; the lightly chewy texture alluring. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she recalled.
Almost immediately, she started slicing fruit and tinkering around with dehydration in her home kitchen, hoping to arrive at an approximation she could enjoy a little more frequently. When she landed on what she was aiming for—something delicate and crisp, but without the added sweetness of the restaurant’s version—she started trying the results out on friends. The response was enthusiastic. Other people should try these, they urged. Yuan wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t put the idea away for good.
In 2011, Yuan, who grew up in Bellevue, returned to Seattle. In November of the next year, she launched Simple & Crisp.
Though grocery stores consider Yuan’s creations a cracker, they elude precise categorization, straddling a line between more-conventional, grain-based crackers, and the dense, chewy dried fruit of the health-food/bulk bin aisle. The wafer-thin slices of apples, pears, and oranges are dried slowly, just until they reach a light snap. And they are elegant, each cross-section of fruit an argument against improving upon nature. Open a package, and you understand why Yuan prefers the term “crisp” to the clunkier-sounding cracker descriptor.
The sophisticated profile was no accident. Yuan wanted the crisps to be versatile enough to go from desktop snacking to entertaining or special occasions—something a host could turn to if she wanted to lend extra panache to a cheese plate or a bowl of fresh berries with cream.
“Simple & Crisp is about the texture, but it’s also about the aesthetic,” Yuan explained. “I wanted the crisps to be delicious, but also beautiful.”
With fruit, she found she didn’t need to look far beyond her raw materials. “I find so much inspiration in nature, so I wanted to highlight that, not hide it.”
Her execution has remained true to that tenet. The fruit for Yuan’s crisps is left unpeeled (more fiber, antioxidants, and, perhaps important, flavor complexity); the added sugar is restrained, with just a whisper of diluted cane sugar syrup added to mediate the bitterness of the rinds. The packaging even plays a role, its hexagonal form a nod, Yuan points out, to the most prevalent geometric shape in nature (The tops of the boxes are also clear, the better to glimpse the pretty slices within.)
Her attention to detail paid off from the start, although, Yuan, admits, she didn’t launch her product in an exactly conventional way. After pitching Simple & Crisp to a host of favorite national magazines, three out of ten, including Martha Stewart Living, Oprah Magazine, and Rachael Ray, invited her to send samples—before she’d even started producing the crisps commercially. (They loved them.)
“Most people, when they’re launching a product, make the product first, then try to sell it,” Yuan said. “I pitched Simple & Crisp first, and then I started making samples.”
The advantage to this reverse route was feedback, mostly on packaging and design. But the validation it offered gave Yuan the confidence to market her product with more gusto. Not only were major media outlets interested in giving her publicity, local retailers were excited about the idea of offering Simple & Crisp to their customers.
“That’s when I really started to realize, okay, I guess no one else is doing anything like this,” Yuan said.
Not even two years after the company’s launch in November of 2012, Simple & Crisp has gone from three employees to 12, and is selling 500 cases a week. The crisps are now sold in specialty food stores across the country, and in June, the company was picked up by Whole Foods Market nationwide. But Yuan credits Seattle’s food community for giving her the first boost.
“I don’t think I could have done this in LA,” she said. “Or in a lot of other places. The food community in Seattle is really supportive. When I was going around pitching Simple & Crisp I realized that. Everyone is really eager here to try and support local products.”
On a recent afternoon, as staff sliced, dried, and packaged Valencia oranges at Yuan’s facility in SODO, the citrusy perfume suffused the space. Upstairs, Yuan’s open, lofty office space overlooks the workspace below, and abuts a kitchen island in the adjacent room. It’s here that she works on the company’s trademark pairings, which Yuan envisions partly as a way for fellow artisans and food lovers to collaborate, using the crisps as a vehicle for exploring new combinations of flavor and texture—like the classic/not-classic pairing of an aged cheddar with an apple crisp, or orange crisps broken into a citrusy soba noodle salad. Cocktail enthusiasts have even begun touting the crisps as an unexpected garnish for a boozy tipple.
“The pairings really set the tone for us,” Yuan explained. “They’re a great representation of our mission, that we really want to highlight other artisans by helping to create a unique experience with their creations. We want to give them a beautiful platform to shine on.”
Before I left, Yuan passed me a few prototypes she’s excited about: a butter-yellow slice of pineapple that looked every bit like a zinnia; a fuchsia wafer of crisped raspberry puree, and—perhaps the most remarkable in concept—a crisp made from the skins of pressed cranberries. The latter was an idea that came from brainstorming with Starvation Alley Farms Cranberries in Long Beach, whose juice-pressing operations leave little use for the skins. She blended them with a little sugar, given the cranberry’s tart profile, and dried them to a sweet-tart brittle. Yuan hopes to debut them next year with the pineapples—sourced from a sustainable grower in Costa Rica—and the raspberry crisps, whose berries will be Washington-grown, as are the pears and apples Yuan already uses.
On the day I visited, Yuan was eagerly awaiting a new batch of cookie cutters—hexagon-shaped—to try out on the raspberry and cranberry versions.
If her company’s trajectory looks like a whirlwind of accomplishment from the outside, Yuan is the first to agree. But if she’s at all fatigued, you can’t see it for all her enthusiasm. She smiles and says,”There’s still so much to explore.”
Simple & Crisp is available at Whole Foods, PCC, Central Co-op, DeLaurenti, Beecher’s Cheese, The Calf & Kid, The Pantry, and London Plane, among others, and online at simpleandcrisp.com.
Emily Horton writes about food and cooking for the Washington Post, Vegetarian Times, the Art of Eating, and other publications. She’s been making dessert out of Simple & Crisp’s pears, dabbed with hazelnut butter, toasted hazelnuts, and a teeny drizzle of honey.
