“These are delicious. You should sell them.”
Everyone knows a person who makes some snack food by hand — spiced nuts, vegan muffins — that’s so delicious friends are always encouraging them to turn it into a business. “You should sell these,” we tell them. “You’d make a fortune!” In our home, it’s Queen Bitez, my imaginary brand name for the crusts cut from our daughter’s peanut butter and jam sandwiches. A simple byproduct to me but very popular with my wife if she’s near the cutting board at 8:15 a.m.
It’s encouraging for friends and family to believe in the value of something we’ve made. But as much as my wife loves these and our daughter has even begun to use the brand name (“Mommy! Your Queen Bitez are ready!”), it would be naive to propose that someone could enter the consumer packaged-goods market dominated by global conglomerates like Nestlé and Mondelez.
However, many people with great food products and big dreams do start businesses, finding modest sales by setting up stands at farmers’ markets, selling online through social media, or getting them on the shelf at a local health-food store. But you can’t quit your job to focus on a business that generates such modest sales.
That’s why York University launched the YSpace Food and Beverage accelerator. Since 2019, YSpace has graduated 10 to 15 startups a year, including Oh My Okra (okra snacks), Aunt Sybil’s Caribbean Flavors (frozen entrées), Stush Patties (Jamaican patties), Ohh! Foods (allergy safe snacks), and Zing (chili sauces).
YSpace was self-funded as a pilot. A second round of funding came from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs in partnership with the Regional Municipality of York. After that came a partnership with Black Creek Community Health Centre and the Black Entrepreneurship Alliance. This year, Agriculture and Agri-food Canada invested just under $500,000 for the program to support under-represented founders nationally.
“There have been different iterations of the funding, but what hasn’t changed is this community,” says Judy Chang, from YSpace.
“There’s a lot of food entrepreneurs, but it feels like they’re quite siloed. They tend to belong to one community, and they may never meet anyone outside of that. It takes a village to raise a child — we think it takes an ecosystem to raise a business. A lot of founders we come across are good at the functional expertise. But I think the smart ones reach a certain point where they realize they can’t do it all.”
For example, when Brittany Charlton was a teenager, she had a severe allergic reaction to her favourite movie-night snack, peanut M&Ms (clearly inferior to Reese’s Pieces peanut). Years later, Charlton was a paralegal student winding down after a yoga class when the teacher asked to taste one of her homemade snacks (free of nuts, tree nuts, gluten, wheat, and refined sugar). The teacher loved them and said that she not only should sell them, but could sell them — in the studio.
A year later, Charlton was selling her allergen-free snacks online and in five yoga studios. While her education had trained her to handle the necessary legal documents, she didn’t know how to put together a cashflow page, do financial modelling, hire people, or structure a job description. Enter YSpace.
“All that stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily know how to do on your own,” says Charlton. “They have classes.”In 2019, Admission to YSpace provided Charlton with access to these types of resources and skill-building. That meant a five-month accelerator program that included mentorship, accountability-milestone setting, peer-to-peer support, and workshops, culminating in a showcase where each session’s founders met with distributors and retailers.Within a year, her products were on shelves at Sobeys, Metro, and Bed Bath and Beyond. National companies like Nestlé have their own production plants. Start-ups partner with co-packers (the in-between manufacturers that produce and package those hot sauces and frozen lasagna trays your local restaurant sells under its own brand) once they level up to retailing through supermarkets.
Charlton, who hadn’t meant for this to be a full-time venture, chose to pull back on expanding distribution partners and focus on how to scale production to meet the demand of these three national retailers. When she was ready, she attended a “speed dating” event for Walmart at which founders like her got 15 minutes with buyers. The Walmart buyer was in love at first bite: Ohh! Foods is now in every Walmart in Canada.
My Queen Bitez product is just a fantasy (though I would love to nab the brand name Quibi as long as no one’s using it). But plenty more food and beverage entrepreneurs in Ontario have ideas and passion for starting businesses. YSpace is a smart investment in those people. As of last year, the ventures it has supported have generated $19.5 million in sales and created 120 jobs. More than half the companies are led by women, and 73 per cent are BIPOC.
One day I hope to see a similar accelerator program for restaurants, but with a commercial kitchen on site. That is how the “ghost kitchen” fad pitched itself, at times, but landlords who own all your sales data can’t really call themselves mentors. San Francisco has something like it, called La Cocina, where local food entrepreneurs (with a focus on women and immigrants who experience higher barriers to entry) get access to shared kitchen space, mentorship, and the kind of skill-building and distribution networking opportunities that YSpace provides.
Something like that would go a long way to unlocking culinary entrepreneurship in Ontario — which is languishing behind a wall of too-high commercial rents.
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