Ramaker’s Imports Inc., which bills itself “Niagara’s first family-run Dutch shop,” next year will celebrate its 50th anniversary and 40th year operating out of a storefont on Ontario Street in St. Catharines.
In 1975 there already was a Dutch store on Vine Street when Hendrik (Henry) Ramaker bought it, realizing a dream of working for no one other than himself after years of answering to someone else in the grocery industry with the former Dominion chain.
Ramaker, who came to Canada from the Netherlands in 1958 with his bride two weeks after getting married, started as a box boy and worked his way up to manager.
“I think he was manager for nine years. He always wanted to be his own boss,” said his daughter Linde Ramaker-Hildebrand, who bought the family business from her father about 13 years ago.
Focusing on selling products from the homeland wasn’t an indication that Ramaker was homesick.
“They wanted to come to Canada. He actually wanted to be a policeman when they were in Holland, but he was as colour-blind as anything,” his daughter said. “Once they got to that part of the test, he was done.
“The housing situation in Holland at the time wasn’t good. He had an aunt who lived here, and that’s how they got on the road to come to Canada.”
Ramaker-Hildebrand, who works at the store along with her daughter Amanda Scali and granddaughter Kayla Zulik-Russo, believes a combination of selection and service is what has set the store apart from the many that have opened and closed over the past five decades.
“Many of our customers have been coming here for almost as long as we’ve been going,” she said. “It’s amazing how many people we’ve gotten to know.
“We listen to them, we know them when they come in.”
She said her father, with his Dominion grocery store training, “knew what he was doing when he started this.”
And Ramaker, who died at 84 in 2018 and was living at Shalom Manor in Grimsby for the last three years of his life, never stepped being a salesman. Ramaker-Hildebrand remembered visiting her father telling him the store was supplying Shalom Manor with the sliced cheese for his sandwiches.
“He said, ‘I’m going to have to tell people to eat more,’” she recalled with a laugh. “He was a businessman right to the end; he was still the salesman all the time.
“He would stand there and talk for 15 minutes with a customer who was having a bad day.”
A tradition of caring and seeing longtime customers as more than a sale has continued under Ramaker-Hildebrand’s leadership.
“We get our stuff done, make sure the customer at the register is taken care of,” she said. “But if somebody comes in and you know them, and you know they’re going through stuff, you spend time with them.”
Ramaker-Hildebrand turned 62 this week and though she works upwards of 80 hours, she still takes the time to do Saturday morning deliveries to some residences for seniors or “ladies who can’t get out anymore.”
“They say, ‘Why are you doing this?’” she said. “It’s because I’ve known them all my life.”
Ramaker’s has changed since it first opened over the years. Besides surviving a pandemic and most recently ongoing construction on Ontario Street, it also has had to deal with import regulations.
After shipping in their own 44-foot containers “for many years,” the store began getting its imports from suppliers, who would be responsible for the licensing and the red tape.
“We would have this basement so full that you would have to walk up the aisle sideways,” Ramaker-Hildebrand said. “But now with all the different licensing — the paperwork is crazy — it got to be too much.”
There’s a sign in the store that boasts “You don’t have to be Dutch to shop here.” Ramaker-Hildebrand estimates that “at least 75, 80 per cent” of the current clientele have a connection to the Netherlands
“There’s some Dutch there. With the older clientele dwindling, it’s a challenge to get the newer ones. We get the kids from the older ones,” she said. “They start coming in to buy the stuff they remember at mom and dad’s or they remember from their omas and opas (grandmothers and grandfathers).
“They look around and say, ‘Oh, we haven’t tried this.’ There are so many dishes that are from Holland, like kale and mashed potatoes and the sausage.”
There also is nasi goreng, a Southeast Asian fried rice dish and one of the national dishes of Indonesia. Until its independence was recognized by the Netherlands in 1949, Indonesia was part of the nationalized colony of the Dutch East Indies
“There is a lot of Indonesian stuff that we sell or try to, the spices.”
Ramaker’s makes its own nasi goreng.
“We sell it frozen,” Ramaker-Hildebrand said. “It’s just trying to bring in what people want.”
The store’s bread and butter is cheese imported from the Netherlands.
“We can’t bring in it ourselves so we deal with suppliers here because way back you needed a quota from the government to bring in cheese,” she said. “We still go through about two tonnes a month, but two tonnes of cheese or three tonnes, what we get in at a time, is only like three skids, three pallets.
“I couldn’t afford a whole container of cheese or have the place to store it.”
Candy is also a big seller. Ramaker’s has 125 candy bins.
“We probably go through 150 kilos a week out of there, and it’s the salty stuff,” Ramaker-Hildebrand said. “You know, black licorice, salty, sweet, gummies, all that kind of stuff.”
During pandemic restrictions, she recalled a customer complaining the province was allowing liquor and beer stores to remain open “because people are addicted to it.”
“Well, he said, ‘I’m addicted to dropjes,’” she added, referring to Dutch licorice.
Ramaker-Hildebrand placed a sign in front in the middle of the parking lot that said “Dropjes are essential.”
“That made one of the Dutch newspapers,” she added.
Ramaker’s remained open throughout the pandemic.
“We had to rope off our gift section, but because we had food and whatnot, we were open,” she said. “We got a lot of new customers.
“With people having to wait in lines and that at the grocery store, they found out we had a deli, then they were coming here.”
She credits a website created by her granddaughter with boosting the store’s online presence and business during road construction in front of the store.
“Our online things are really picking up. Probably in the last two weeks, I sold more online than I did in the first six months.”
Operating a business during construction on Ontario Street has been “really challenging,” she said.
“The one thing that’s saving us is what my granddaughter has done, getting it out there on Facebook,” said Ramaker-Hildebrand, adding the post was shared thousands of times. “Now, I’ve people coming in going, ‘I didn’t realize.’
“It had gotten to the point where normally I would order a skid of apple sauce, but right now I can’t afford a skid so I’ll order 10 cases.
“Things are starting to pick up and the advertising has been amazing.”
The roadwork is expected to be completed at the end of July.
“Rankin (Construction) has been excellent. They keep me updated about what they’re doing and if I need help with something. One guy saw a lady struggling to get in the front door; he dropped what he was doing out there and came running.”
Ramaker-Hildebrand, who was 13 when she became involved in the family business, still enjoys her job after all these years.
“If I didn’t love it, there’s no way I could be here every day,” she said. “Everybody else is getting paid more than I am, but that’s OK.
“I never thought I would be in this spot, and it’s been 13 years. Sometimes, I still feel like a kid.”
Daughter Amanda is “learning the ropes” and preparing to become the third generation to operate the store.
“I want to keep it in the family. I don’t want to have to sell it one day.”