Say 'cheese': new Farmers' Market star’s tasty new ventures
Shannon Onstot's Tyromance Fine Snacks wants to up your cheese plate game, one GF and low-glycemic treat at a time.
After a successful TV career — that included both local news and gigs such as being prize producer for Let’s Make a Deal — Shannon Onstot was ready for change. She left L.A. for upstate New York to be closer to family and as she, her partner, Jeff Patridge; and their son, Bruce, now 4; settled in, she began to set her sights on…cheese.
It was quite the pivot for someone who had never worked in restaurants or retail, but the path was clear. Her first East Coast job was at a hotel in the Berkshires — for which she was quickly handed solo managerial duties for an entire weekend when the owner couldn’t be there.
“Compared to TV production, it was nothing,” she laughs. “But I was working with the chef; I was working with the servers, all for the first time. I was doing a lot of customer relations, too, and I started doing cheese plates for them. My friends love food and wine, so they got into it, and we started doing really fun stuff for the hotel’s clientele.”
Then she stumbled on the book Cheese Sex Death by Erica Kubick, where she learned the word “tyromance.”
“It’s the reading of fortunes in cheese curds,” Onstot says of choosing that unusual word as her new business name. “From that little nugget, I started building.”
While she did get a part-time job behind the elite cheese counter at Whole Foods, Onstot’s entrepreneurial endeavors veered — at first — away from working directly with the creamy treat.
“I'm gluten free, diabetic and bougie.”
Shannon Onstot
“I thought I was going to start doing cheese plates to go, and people could just pick them up,” she says. “New York State was like, ‘No, no, no you can’t do that.’ But now I’m a registered home processor.”
The Tyromance Fine Snacks owner decided to focus instead on the accoutrements for a home cheese plate — but with food restrictions on the mind. “I'm gluten free, diabetic and bougie,” she says. “It's really hard for me to find food that fits into all those categories.”
Within a year, Onstot had learned her way around the state permitting system, the inevitable art of failure when it comes to trying new recipes, and the confidence to put her creations on the market. She’s now a staple of the Saturday and Wednesday Saratoga Springs Farmers’ markets and their Monday satellite in Clifton Park.
For sale at the Tyromance booth: gluten-free and low-glycemic crackers, nut mixes and single-serving jams for cheese plates, and a thriving granola business that surprised her. Right now, since the weather’s cooled off a bit, she’s gearing up to bring back her breadsticks made with Parmesan (“the butter has to be a certain temperature, so if it’s hot or humid they never come out”). And by the end of September, she’s hoping to introduce a fifth granola flavor she calls an “apple currant hazelnut situation,” and a low-sugar apple butter with maple.
There’s also a new Substack newsletter, and come winter she’ll be doing more wholesale — so keep your eye out for the Tyromance logo when shopping for nuts, granola and buckwheat crackers.
“I’m currently hoping to upgrade to a kitchen — not necessarily as a retail space, but just a kitchen where I can become a 20-C license and work with cheese,” Onstot says. “I want to focus on local and imported cheeses, less charcuterie and more of a monger’s plate.
“Eventually, maybe I’ll want a brick-and-mortar or a truck, which could go to weddings, breweries, wineries — a little mobile cheese charcuterie truck since I don’t want to be stuck in one spot.”
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