In 1978, at a community fair in Killaloe (west of Ottawa), Pam and Grant Hooker began to sell pastries that they dubbed “beaver tails,” made from a Hooker family recipe. Today, BeaverTailsis a chain of restaurants that sell these pastries, with locations in many Canadian cities as well as in other countries. The restaurants are managed by BeaverTails Canada Inc., headquartered in Montreal.
Origin of BeaverTails
Indigenous people in Canada generally use all parts of the animals that they hunt. They especially prize beavers,whose fur they use to make clothing and bedspreads. Under the French and English colonial regimes, Indigenous people traded furs with Europeans in exchange for toolsand other manufactured goods. Indigenous people also ate the meat of the beaver, including the flesh from its tail. They cooked the beavers’ tails over a fire so that the scales on them would loosen and the flesh would cook completely.
In the 17th century, the bishop of Quebec City decreed that the beaver was a fish, because it lived mainly in the water and had scales on its tail, which meant that the RomanCatholic inhabitants of New France could eat beaver on Fridays and during Lent, when their Church forbid them to eat meat.
The pastries that we now call BeaverTails came from a recipe belonging to Grant Hooker’s grandmother, who was of German origin. She fried pastry dough, then topped it withbutter, jam, honey or cinnamon sugar and served it for breakfast. Years later, the Hooker family developed a quicker version of her recipe, and in 1978, the family business began selling these pastries for the first time at a community fair in a smalltown near Ottawa. Pam and Grant’s daughter thought that the pastries looked like beavers’ tails, and that was how they got the name by which they have been known ever since.
History of the Company
In the late 1970s, the Hooker family was selling its pastries at two shops in Ottawa: one along the Rideau Canaland the other in the ByWard Market. At that time, the company was known as Hooker’s Great Canadian Beaver Tail Pastry/Pâtisseries Queues de Castors.
In 1987, a university student named Pino Di Ioia took a summer job managing the BeaverTails booth at the La Ronde amusem*nt park in Montreal, the company’s first location outsideof Ottawa. Years later, Di Ioia became the company’s CEO and moved its headquarters to Montréal, his home town.
In the 1990s, Quebec became the company’s largest market in Canada, while the company began expanding rapidly both elsewhere in Canada and abroad.
In 2002, the team of Di Ioia, his wife, Tina Serrao, and his twin brother, Anthony, took over the management of the company. They paused expansion, closed underperforming locations, and focused on running the business properly. In 2008, they opened newlocations with expanded menus, including ice cream and poutine at some locations.
At first, franchises were allowed to choose the toppings that they put on their pastries, so the BeaverTails came in a wide variety of flavours. But this variety caused problems with quality control. To solve them, Grant Hooker decided to limit and standardizethe choice of toppings at all locations, so that the pastries that the customers were eating would truly match the BeaverTails brand.
In 2015 and 2016, the company expanded into the United States. In 2018, as it celebrated its 40th anniversary, the company had 140 locations in Canada, the United States and several other countries, including Japan, France, the United Arab Emirates andSouth Korea.
The company is now managed by former front-line employees. The Hooker family is proud to have trained and employed some 9,000 to 11,000 young people over the years, for many of whom working at BeaverTails was their first summer job. The Hookers now holda minority share in the company and own and operate all of the franchises in the Ottawa-Gatineau area (see National Capital Region).
Branding Conflict
BeaverTails Canada Inc. holds the rights to the brand name “BeaverTails” as well as to the creation of the pastry, but many people don’t know that this name is a registered trademark.
In 2016, Julie Van Rosendaal, a food writer in Calgary, published a recipe for beaver tails on her website. The company ordered her to change the name, because “BeaverTails” wasa registered trademark. She changed the name to “Beaver Doughnuts”, but the company felt that the resemblance was still too strong and that Van Rosendaal should choose a different name. In response, she changed it to Canadian Semiaquatic Rodent PosteriorDoughnut — a story that made the news throughout Canada. The company finally gave in, apologized to Van Rosendaal, made a $3000 contribution to a Calgary food bank, and acknowledged that it did not claim any rights to the word “beaver.”
