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
cgilbert@lcnews.ca
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.”