Farm Boy keeps it close to home with 40+ local suppliers New
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Farm Boy keeps it close to home with 40+ local suppliers New
www.londoncommunitynews.com Thursday, May 29, 2014 Volume 4, Issue 22 • 36 Pages www.londoncommunitynews.com New speciality food retailer, located at 1045 Wellington Road in the city’s south end, opens in June Farm Boy keeps it close to home with 40+ local suppliers CRAIG GILBERT PHOTO Organic Works owner Peter Cuddy is joined by Emilie Nelson and Kelsey Therrien happily showing off some of the specialty baked goods London’s new Farm Boy will feature when it opens in June. CRAIG GILBERT [email protected] When Organic Works owner Peter Cuddy heard Farm Boy was coming to London, he thought it was a joke. The Wellington Road bakery has been supplying the Ottawa-based farm-fresh specialty food retailer chain for three years already, so Cuddy had a laugh with the management that his breads are so good they were coming to him. “Instead of me moving to you, you’re moving closer to me,” he wrote Farm Boy manager Andre Bellemare in an email. “We all had a good laugh at that.” Farm Boy and Organic Works is a match made in food heaven. Both family-centred, fresh-focused food businesses, Cuddy said he couldn’t begin to supply a larger grocery chain cold turkey, but the relationship with Farm Boy will help them expand proportionately. “It was done on a handshake,” he said of the family-corporate hybrid relationship. “It’s a great growth opportunity for us. They treat us more like customers than vendors and that’s an awesome way to do business.” Customers of the London Farm Boy store, located next to Chapters on Wellington Road, can look forward to seeing classic Organic Works favourites and some cool new creations planned for the shelves this summer. The store will open in June, but the exact date hasn’t been finalized yet. Naturally the bakery’s top sellers will be available, including the quinoa and honey and quinoa and maple breads, both made with quinoa milled from raw seeds right in the SoHo bakery. “When we start baking at midnight, it’s a very, very fresh flour,” Cuddy explained. “A lot of times when imported seeds come in they’re milled and left for six months or a year, so they get stale like anything else. Ours is baked within hours of being milled, you can actually smell the freshness.” The honey is organic and local too, a clover summer blossom blend from Clovermead in Aylmer, as is the Mennonite-made organic certified Mount Forest maple syrup that goes in the other big seller. Follow that with chia buckwheat bread with buckwheat from their exclusive 700acre supplier in New Liskeard shipped from the Northern Ontario farm hub to London every three weeks. A fresh shipment will arrive this Friday (May 30). “It’s the only way to make food.” Add bread made with flaxseed from Ilderton, and a special oat bread that is not just gluten-free but wheat-free thanks to Doug Hill in Thorndale, who grows the ingredients, mills them and delivers the product twice a month. The organic apple cider vinegar that goes in all the bread is made in Mount Forest also. “The other Saturday I drove up to deliver 4,000 cookies for Maple Organics’ ice cream cookies, then I drove to Mount Forest to pick up the apple cider vinegar (and) the maple syrup,” Cuddy said. “So though I wouldn’t quite call us a mom and pop company, we are able to blend some very homespun philosophies into a fairly sophisticated industry.” All the dessert items, including cookies, cupcakes, squares and other loafs will be available too, as will a new coconut bread that’s low-glycemic and acceptable for the prehistoric Paleo diet, which forbids anything that wasn’t available in cavedwelling times – no pasta, cereal or other refined grains allowed, and zero junk food goes without saying. He calls it their first “doctor recom- mended” bread. It’ll be joined by yeastfree bread in July. “People are looking for a healthier product to eat so anytime I have a new product I fire it up to Farm Boy, they usually have a look and give it a thumbs up and we launch it within a few days,” he said. “It’s awesome.” Organic Works is one of about 40 local suppliers ready to stock the Farm Boy shelves. Youth Opportunities Unlimited (YOU) is another, as they’ve struck an agreement to sell the preserves made there by young people enrolled in their program under the supervision of Chef Ricardo. With plans for Farm Boy to help their fundraising program with food donations for the café’s kitchen, executive director Steve Cordes is as excited as Cuddy to do business with Farm Boy. “This is a transformative partnership for us – the recognition for both of our organizations will be well deserved,” Cordes said. “The new and expanded experiences offered to youth as a result will be fantastic. When corporate cultures are in such strong alignment, the partnerships develop naturally.”