At the end of the month, the City of Toronto will evict a popular organic foods shop from St. Lawrence Market after 17 years.
Nancy Manotas Ciancibello, owner of Manotas Organics and Fine Latin Foods, said the city has given her a month to vacate her stall in the lower level of the south market building, where she has sold organic soups, salsas, empanadas, guacamole and arepas since 2009.
In a letter on March 28, the city, which owns and manages the public market, said it was terminating her month-to-month lease on April 30 without providing any reason. But Ciancibello said market manager Daniel Picheca told her the termination was related, in part, to late rent payments.
Financial records provided by Ciancibello show she was late on a handful of payments since 2024, including in January and February of this year. In each case, Ciancibello said she always paid the outstanding rent before the month was over, sometimes within a matter of days.
Ciancibello, however, said she believes the city is targeting her because she spoke out about changes at the market.
“I am questioning what really is happening here,” Ciancibello wrote to city staff in response to the termination.
City spokesperson Kayla Lewis said she could not comment on specifics of the situation with Ciancibello.
“Successful vendors are critical to the vibrancy and long-term success of the St Lawrence Market,” Lewis said in an emailed statement. “City of Toronto staff treat all leasing decisions critically, which includes a thorough review and evaluation.”
Commercial real estate lawyers told the Star that the reasons underpinning the city’s decision don’t really matter, since a landlord is technically within their legal rights to terminate a month-to-month lease by giving one month’s notice. But Stephen Posen, a Toronto-based partner with the firm Dickinson Wright, said terminating a long-term client after 17 years with just a month’s notice, “seems, to me, a very strange or amoral way” for a landlord to conduct itself.
One of Cianciabello’s main issues with the city had to do with her lease. She said she hadn’t been given a new long-term lease since her last agreement expired in 2019. In her letter to the city, she said she was told a new long-term lease was coming, but instead stayed on a month-to-month lease for years.
In recent years, the city has rolled out a series of updates at the market that have been controversial to some merchants, such as extending store hours, opening on Sundays, and bringing in new tenants to fill high-profile vacancies. The city has also signalled plans to roll out a new “lease strategy,” looking to shake up the mix of businesses at the market and possibly make changes to the rent.
“We’re developing a lease strategy to look at our lease portfolio at the market. We look at the vendor mix. We look at the rent model,” Picheca told the Star in October 2025.
Manotas said she was outspoken in meetings, saying that the city should not raise rents as part of the new lease strategy. She argued that any attempt to bring rates more in line with the broader neighbourhood wouldn’t make sense, since merchants at the historic public market were different than commercial tenants in street-front units. One of the draws of the market is its characters, who have preserved a more traditional way of doing business. The merchants and their families typically know customers by name, and will occasionally hand out discounts to regulars.
“This building alone, empty, doesn’t mean anything if the merchants are not here,” Ciancibello said in an interview.
Ciancibello, who emigrated from Colombia in 1980, said she paid about $300,000 to buy a business in the market in 2009, and then started Manotas Organics. She also has a location at Union Station, as well as a line of prepared foods sold in grocery stores.
“We’ll lose absolutely everything,” she said in an interview. “My reputation is at stake.”
