Small Hand Foods
Jennifer Colliau’s San Francisco craft syrup company, founded 2009 out of her work behind the bar at Slanted Door. Made the case that orgeat, gum syrup, and pineapple gum could be sold commercially without compromise—and built the small-batch craft-syrup category that everyone else now occupies.
If Liber & Co. is the practical answer for orgeat, Small Hand Foods is the gold-standard one. Jennifer Colliau founded the company in 2009 after years behind the bar at San Francisco’s Slanted Door, where she’d been making her own orgeat and gum syrup because nothing she could buy was good enough. The home recipes turned into commercial recipes. The commercial recipes turned into a tiny San Francisco production company. Sixteen years later, Small Hand Foods is the syrup that the most serious craft bars in the country use, and Colliau is the syrup maker that other syrup makers cite as their reference.
The Small Hand Foods Orgeat is denser, more almond-forward, and more aromatic than anything else commercially available. Made with California almonds (Colliau is particular about the variety and roast), real orange flower water, and a long maceration. The price reflects the work—a 12-oz bottle runs $20-25—but the result is the only commercial orgeat that fully holds its own against good homemade. Small Hand Foods Pineapple Gum Syrup is the secret weapon of the modern Hotel Nacional Special and dozens of other revival-era drinks; it’s a working alternative to the long-since-discontinued vintage Joseph Manceau pineapple gum that Charles H. Baker wrote about in the 1930s. The Gum Syrup itself (rich simple syrup with gum arabic emulsifier) is the texture upgrade that makes a Mai Tai or Daiquiri feel professional.
Colliau’s company is famously direct-only. She doesn’t sell on Amazon. She doesn’t license to distributors. You buy from her website, and the bottles ship from San Francisco. This is a deliberate choice—she keeps the production small, the quality controlled, and the margins reasonable, and the trade-off is that Small Hand Foods is a little harder to acquire than Liber. For the home bar that wants the best, it’s worth the extra step.
Buy: Direct only at smallhandfoods.com. The Orgeat and Pineapple Gum are the two essentials. The Gum Syrup is the third buy once those become regulars.