The “Terminal,” as it’s usually called, bounces and lurches across 40 of the country’s most expensive acres in Toronto’s west end, filling a gap between The Queensway and Canada’s busiest road, the multi-lane Queen Elizabeth Way.
Like those street names, and in fact like much of this neighbourhood in the Etobicoke-Lakeshore ward of west end Toronto, the Ontario Food Terminal hails from the 1950s.
It looks it, too, something like an end-of-life strip mall surrounded by chain-link fencing, where even the newly planted poplar trees are so small they seem to make the industrial bleakness of the place even bleaker. What can millions of Torontonians think about the state of agriculture, I wonder, when this is the only image they see?
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Maybe it’s good that commuters are so busy tailgating the guy ahead, they can’t possibly crane their necks to check out the fading paint and scarred concrete.
But any thoughts of bleakness disappear the second I approach the main gate. Flanked by long lines of trailers from companies such as Canadian Fruit, Vegpak Produce, Gambles Ontario Produce, and Tomato King, the lot beyond the gate is teeming with vehicles, and when I roll down my window, the air is choked with the frenzied beeping of reverse indicators and a cloud of diesel fumes.
It’s 8:30 a.m. The day is half over, and the inbound flow is matched by vehicles leaving, including every sort of car, van,
truck and gleaming tractor-trailer. I’m glad I’m not driving the outbound pickup capped by a skid of sweet corn perched atop a lego-like stack of boxes.
This is the largest wholesale fruit and produce distribution centre in Canada, and the third largest by volume in North America. Buyers pay a fee to register, and must prove they are not the end consumer. There are approximately 5,000 registered buyers who come through these gates, including independent grocers, convenience stores, restaurants, caterers, hotels, and even florists, landscapers and garden centres. Chain store buyers also come to make up for short-stocked items.
The numbers are staggering. The overall business volume in 2008 was 1.9 billion pounds.
Yet its clout is even bigger. When I get waved through the gate and finally meet general manager Bruce Nicholas, he likens the terminal to a price barometer that influences produce prices nationwide, saying buyers often refer to the “Toronto price.” He adds that in many cases, buyers and sellers transact deals at the terminal for direct delivery — so the influence of the terminal exceeds its physical capacity.
Nicholas says the terminal gets out-of-country attention too, and he explains how the movers and shakers of the food industry across North America study the model here. “They come to look at Toronto,” Nicholas says, noting that the Ontario Food Terminal is unique in running a farmers’ market in a wholesale environment.
Self-assured and intense, Nicholas says, “We are a leading force.”
The question is, at a time when food markets are seeing explosive growth in the local-food segment, and when more buyers are insisting on traceability, is the food terminal leading us into the future or back into the past?
To help find the answer, I’m joined by some unexpected recruits. With Nicholas in his office are a half-dozen white-coated culinary students from Liaison College, here for a tour of where so much of their food comes from. “This place is supply and demand,” Nicholas emphatically tells them. “You guys make up demand.”
The Ontario Food Terminal levels the playing field for smaller players, Nicholas says, and he goes on to warn the future chefs that without the terminal, the consolidation that led to the big grocery stores would spiral out of sight. That, he says, is a big part of the mission of the food terminal. He shakes his head, then advises his listeners to support independent grocery stores.
Finishing off the presentation to the culinary students, Nicholas with his colleague, Gianfranco Leo, assemble our group for a tour of the facility. As the office door opens, a grocery store smell wafts in and the quiet is shoved aside by
the whizzing sound of motorized forklifts. This is clearly going to be a tour where we need to keep our wits about us.
Farmers’ market
The farmers’ market area operates below a raised parking deck. Nicholas guides us through it, greeting growers by name. We walk past boxes of white eggplant, gigantic peaches, and early apples. There are 550 stalls here, half of which are sheltered by the parking deck. Nicholas says there are 400 registered farmer tenants who lease by the day, or for six-or 12-month periods. Some farmers sell only their own produce, while others are registered as dealers and can sell produce other than their own, but pay four times the fee.
Nicholas pulls aside a couple growers for me to chat with. They’re not shy, nor could they be, working in this sort of place. Rick Phillips, who farms in the Holland Marsh about an hour north of Toronto, tells me he started coming here 40 years ago with his grandfather, and now comes three days a week, arriving at 4 a. m. Another seller, Bill Boots from Scotland, Ont., shows me his squash, leeks, dill and basil. He says selling at the terminal requires an understanding of personalities, cultures, and, most importantly, the art of negotiating.
Nicholas rejoins me, saying the big American wholesale markets haven’t been able to successfully integrate a farmer component in their operations. “We do it,” he says, adding, “We’re the experts.”
The Ontario Food Terminal Board
While terminal management shrouds itself in a business credo, it’s not a conventional business. The terminal is owned and operated by the Ontario Food Terminal Board. It’s a creature of government — an arm’s-length entity of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, with a staff of 40 full-and part-time employees and a seven-member board of directors appointed by the ministry.
Nicholas tells the future chefs that the operation is financially self-sustaining, saying, “If more organizations in government operated the way we do, we’d be better off. We don’t cost the taxpayers a red cent.”
It sounds far from the stereotype of a government agency, but that wasn’t my impression when I first tried to arrange a meeting. It was difficult to reach a live person by phone, and the return call was painfully slow. Then, on the day of my meeting, I found that I’d been paired with these culinary school students. But if there’s any inefficiency, it doesn’t stem from government largesse; instead, it’s because this is such a lean operation. “There’s nobody that can operate as efficiently as us with this number of people,” Nicholas tells me as we discuss the operation of the terminal.
The experience is very different from when I contacted board member Mark Pearlman, who by day is director of the sales delivery solutions group operations at Hewlett Packard. Pearlman’s assistant booked my interview within a day. Then I phoned a toll-free number and entered a conference number to be connected with Pearlman, who said that in all his private-sector experience, spanning supply-chain logistics, operating warehouses, and activity-based costing, he’s seen nothing like the Terminal.
“That’s a very small team of people that runs a very large terminal — and it’s pretty amazing what that team of people does,” Pearlman says, adding, “They
the whizzing sound of motorized forklifts. This is clearly going to be a tour where we need to keep our wits about us.
Farmers’ market
The farmers’ market area operates below a raised parking deck. Nicholas guides us through it, greeting growers by name. We walk past boxes of white eggplant, gigantic peaches, and early apples. There are 550 stalls here, half of which are sheltered by the parking deck. Nicholas says there are 400 registered farmer tenants who lease by the day, or for six-or 12-month periods. Some farmers sell only their own produce, while others are registered as dealers and can sell produce other than their own, but pay four times the fee.
Nicholas pulls aside a couple growers for me to chat with. They’re not shy, nor could they be, working in this sort of place. Rick Phillips, who farms in the Holland Marsh about an hour north of Toronto, tells me he started coming here 40 years ago with his grandfather, and now comes three days a week, arriving at 4 a. m. Another seller, Bill Boots from Scotland, Ont., shows me his squash, leeks, dill and basil. He says selling at the terminal requires an understanding of personalities, cultures, and, most importantly, the art of negotiating.
Nicholas rejoins me, saying the big American wholesale markets haven’t been able to successfully integrate a farmer component in their operations. “We do it,” he says, adding, “We’re the experts.”
The Ontario Food Terminal Board
While terminal management shrouds itself in a business credo, it’s not a conventional business. The terminal is owned and operated by the Ontario Food Terminal Board. It’s a creature of government — an arm’s-length entity of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, with a staff of 40 full-and part-time employees and a seven-member board of directors appointed by the ministry.
Nicholas tells the future chefs that the operation is financially self-sustaining, saying, “If more organizations in government operated the way we do, we’d be better off. We don’t cost the taxpayers a red cent.”
It sounds far from the stereotype of a government agency, but that wasn’t my impression when I first tried to arrange a meeting. It was difficult to reach a live person by phone, and the return call was painfully slow. Then, on the day of my meeting, I found that I’d been paired with these culinary school students. But if there’s any inefficiency, it doesn’t stem from government largesse; instead, it’s because this is such a lean operation. “There’s nobody that can operate as efficiently as us with this number of people,” Nicholas tells me as we discuss the operation of the terminal.
The experience is very different from when I contacted board member Mark Pearlman, who by day is director of the sales delivery solutions group operations at Hewlett Packard. Pearlman’s assistant booked my interview within a day. Then I phoned a toll-free number and entered a conference number to be connected with Pearlman, who said that in all his private-sector experience, spanning supply-chain logistics, operating warehouses, and activity-based costing, he’s seen nothing like the Terminal.
“That’s a very small team of people that runs a very large terminal — and it’s pretty amazing what that team of people does,” Pearlman says, adding, “They
