Eating locally really took root in Toronto this year.
Farmers' markets are now a fixture throughout the city, in some cases year-round. The big chain grocers have got on board too, highlighting the provenance of locally-grown produce. But that hasn't been enough for one dedicated, yet struggling purveyor of "everything Ontario," who's been forced to go cap-in-hand to her customers.
Kathleen Mackintosh is the fiercely proud owner-proprietor of Culinarium, a small Davisville-area grocer dedicated to showcasing Ontario products.
She's been open since 2008, and though she says business has been good, it's not been enough to stay afloat, let alone grow. So, facing the end of her lease in February, Mackintosh recently sent her customers a heartfelt plea.
Without between $50,000 and $100,000 in cash, MacKintosh said she'd have to close her business.
"I felt I was standing naked in front of my customers," Mackintosh told CTV.ca of her decision to lay bare the extent of her store's financial woes.
"I really, truly had searched my soul and realized it's a scary thing to declare to people that you need help. the people that you see everyday, they literally lean across the counter and you put on a brave face and say it's fine, sales are improving."
But without an injection of capital, and quick, Mackintosh says she'd have no other choice.
Considering her business is so closely tied to the farmers who supply her wares, it makes sense Mackintosh turned to the model of Community Shared Agriculture, or CSAs, to try to raise money. Farmers have traditionally used CSAs to ensure they have customers before they take the risk of planting their crops.Whether their harvest is bountiful, or spoiled by blight, they've already been paid.
Last year, Stratford, Ont. cheesemaker Ruth Klahsen took the idea one step farther when, spurred by the loss of her lease on the Stratford dairy she had called home, she solicited supporters to purchase more than $400,000 in cheese shares. That money helped her establish a new dairy that opened to the delight of locavores this year.
Thus inspired, Mackintosh proposed a "Shared Dinner Plate Program" that begs payment now for products later. A $500 share, for example, would net $600 in products over the next three years.
"You have to hit a point where you truly can't go on before you can seek alternative solutions or really think about new ways of doing things," she explained. "It probably had to hit that point before I could find the courage to go forward."
In light of Mackintosh's struggle, the driving force behind Real Food For Real Kids, a caterer focused on providing meals for young people in daycares, schools and camps across the Toronto area, admires what the struggling shopkeeper is trying to achieve. In an interview with CTV.ca, RFRK "Founding Mom" Lulu Cohen-Farnell said she can identify with Culinarium's woes.
"I think limiting yourself to just doing local is a very humble and noble goal. It's amazing. However, this is what happens. It's not enough, it's very limiting and it's expensive."
That's because, perversely, it can cost more to get an apple from Ontario than one from half-a-world away.
Mackintosh has learned the hard way that the cost of selling locally-sourced foods is higher than one would think. Although Culinarium's Ontario-sourced products don't have to travel as far as imports, they don't benefit from the same infrastructure, distribution or pooling of resources.
Compared to a corner store that uses two or three distributors to source all its products for example, Kathleen says Culinarium relies on 120 individual producers to supply her store.
"So the supply and the way we get our food is still infrastructure-light," she said, putting it mildly. After all, to supplement the deliveries she takes through farmer's markets in the city, her retired father does a regular circuit around the province, picking up goods directly from farmers and producers.
When she launched her business 6 years ago, Cohen-Farnell says she didn't have enough volume to entice individual farmers to deliver the produce she wanted either.
In the years since, however, she's overcome those initial difficulties to grow RFRK into a business with 60 employees and 14 trucks delivering made-from-scratch food for 6,000 little mouths in the GTA everyday.
It helps that making food, from scratch, for 6,000 little mouths everyday translates into some pretty substantial standing orders.
But, she says the lack of farm-to-city infrastructure is still a major challenge for businesses selling locally-sourced food.
According to investment banker-turned-butcher Mario Fiorucci, the problem is particularly bad for small businesses, simply because they lack the volume of sales.
As co-owner of The Healthy Butcher -- which has grown from a single storefront 6 years ago to three locations now dotted around the city -- Fiorucci has experienced the many of the same challenges sticking to his commitment to locally-sourced meat and produce.
"We grew out of necessity because you need to have volume in grocery in order to be able to do anything of any use," Fiourcci told CTV.ca. "That was a key factor we realized right at the beginning."
With that realization, Fiorucci says he's had to define his business as more than a purveyor of things grown or raised in Ontario.
"We don't just do local, and we don't just do organic. We also do quality," he explained.
"No matter what we're bringing in, it's all from Ontario, organically raised on sustainable farms.But we make sure it's more than that, that it's actually something that's going to be a good product."
Mario Pingue of Niagara Food Specialties goes a step further. His business produces artisanal cured meat products like prosciutto and salami from locally-sourced pigs, but Pingue says he's not convinced trumpeting local connections is really a selling feature.
"Anytime I'm selling a product, I never sell it just because it's local. I never would expect to be successful just based on the fact that we have local products," he said, echoing Fiorucci's focus on quality. "Thanks to globalization, our market is open to all other producers around the world. So being local in that regard may not be an advantage."
So what's a locavore businessperson to do?
Reflecting on the clash between her personal experience as a vegan and the demands of feeding thousands of kids with a dizzying array of tastes and preferences, Cohen-Farnell says she has learned that success sometimes demands compromise.
"Not compromising on your values, but compromising on the offering may be important in order to have a business withstand the crisis and stay alive," she stressed, recalling an episode years ago when she was approached by a mother who suggested RFRK was wrong not to offer beef on its menus.
"She was telling me that I was crazy, that we needed beef in our lives," Cohen-Farnell said. Until then RFRK had meat on its menu, but not beef. Realizing that both she and the irate mom held "extreme" viewpoints, Cohen-Farnell says she was spurred to find a supplier who could give her beef she could serve and sleep at night.
"My philosophy of food is not having beef, but I can't have this in my business because I wouldn't be feeding 6,000 kids and giving 60 people a job today."
Offering advice to Kathleen, Cohen-Farnell suggests that, short of turning to conventional products, she might "try to create a change in her business that attracts more people and not just a niche market."
But for Chef Scott Vivian, an alum of local food movement poster-chef Jamie Kennedy's kitchens who opened his own restaurant Beast in Toronto last summer, there's no way Mackintosh should abandon her ideals.
"Philosophy and ethics, to me, is just as important as running your successful business. If it is something that's true and dear to your heart and you're doing it because it's something that you believe in -- not just because it happens to be the cool thing to do right now -- then I think you need to stick to it and try to figure out what you can do," he told CTV.ca.
When it comes to rejigging her business model, Mackintosh is adamant she will never abandon the philosophy that compelled her to open the store in the first place.
"We can tweak the concept, but Culinarium will never be, so long as I own it, anything other than 100 per cent Ontario," she said, explaining that, "the sole reason we exist is to drive pride and excitement around what's grown here in Ontario."
She does admit all retailers have to constantly adjust their offerings, but that's as far as she's willing to go.
With her current lease expiring at the end of January, Mackintosh has a few short weeks to determine the fate of her enterprise. Just two weeks in, Mackintosh told CTV.ca she'd received pledges amounting to almost $50,000, not to mention the great response to an offer through online coupon broker Groupon.
Struggling to find words to express her gratitude, Mackintosh says the response has been "absolutely overwhelming". And she says she's "pretty confident" the business will survive into the new year.
"What we're building is a community to take Culinarium and the concept of local eating into the future."
Even if she does commit to keeping her doors open, and starts asking supporters to turn their pledges into real cash contributions, Mackintosh says she can only guarantee the future for another 12 months, tops.
"We're definitely interested in promising another year and then we have to see how it goes after that," she said. "But our share program is based on a guarantee that if we get the numbers we will stay in business for one year. After that we want to be around, but there is a risk."
