Angela Donnelly and partner JJ have sold Ontario-grown fruits and vegetables out of their Raise the Root grocery store in Toronto’s Leslieville community for more than a decade.
When the store opened in 2014 as a followup to their organic food home-delivery business, catering to a widespread anti-American market was not top of mind. The couple (and their friend Amy, who left the store in 2022) just really wanted a produce market in their neighbourhood that sold organic products, Donnelly said.
“I do think that the organic space is pretty pro-local,” she said.
Now, Donnelly is seeing the business she started take on new meaning as droves of people join a growing “Buy Canadian” movement in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and taunts of annexing Canada. She is also seeing big grocery store chains “jumping on the bandwagon” to promote themselves as “Team Canada.”
“One of the things I have been saying to our customers is that, we’re kind of OG,” Donnelly told the Star. “I do think that some of the small folks like us, that’s the kind of work that we’ve been doing for a long time. And so we’re still doing it, obviously.”
As more Canadians have turned to locally made or produced items over the past couple months, Raise the Root and other independent grocery stores in Toronto say things have largely been business as usual. If anything, these “small folks” have noticed more first-time customers in the aisles.
“It’s helping us,” Donnelly said. “I think that people do know that we care about the origin (of products), and that they’re going to get the truth about the origin at our store.”
A few kilometres north in East York, David Schmucker said he’s definitely noticed new people coming in to Fresh From the Farm, the grocery store his parents, Jacqui and Tim, founded in 1996.
“We’re a good local option and they’re coming to check us out,” said the youngest Schmucker, who took over the store from his parents in January this year.
Like Donnelly, the Schmuckers founded their family store long before any talk of tariffs or 51st-state jeers. According to David, Tim opened the store after students in his ESL classes began asking where to buy locally sourced meat. The students wanted to support family-run farms like they did in their home countries, David recounted.
“Then they found out that my dad has a cousin that’s a farmer,” he said. “And then they’re like, ‘Oh, well can you get us beef?’ ”
From there, David explained, Fresh From the Farm was born: his parents started with selling meat and eventually branched out to other food items. Today, most of the meat, produce, eggs and dairy the family sells comes from Ontario Amish and Mennonite farmers in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.
Both Donnelly and Schmucker point to the success of their stores over the years as evidence that buying local produce is doable, even in the cold winter months.
“You can eat Ontario right now and not even really be suffering that much,” Donnelly said. She noted that Raise the Root has a lot of root vegetables at the moment, along with cucumbers, tomatoes and baby romaine grown in greenhouses around Ontario. The store is also selling apples from B.C., before they switch over to Ontario apples in September.
Even bigger grocery chains have local produce all year round, explained Richard Lee, executive director of the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers association, with shelves best stocked between March and December.
Still, shoppers need to be careful at these stores, Lee said, because some items might accidentally be placed under incorrect signage during restocks.
“It’s really important to both check the signs on the shelf, but also the individual stickers and packaging that clearly identify the country of origin of the products,” Lee said.
At Raise the Root, Donnelly said staff have started checking the labels on their shelves more frequently as more customers become interested in the source of their food.
“Once a week we would do a full overhaul to make sure there were no incorrect price tags,” she said. “But now we’re doing it every day. We’re doing a really intense check to make sure that we’re not making any mistakes.”
The growing interest in Canadian-made products has led Schmucker to begin looking for replacements for the few American items on the shelves at Fresh From the Farm. He noted that he started ordering granola bars from B.C. instead of the States after a recent restock.
“We’re kind of also discovering good products produced in Canada that we didn’t necessarily know was there,” he said.
As the shelves at Fresh From the Farm evolve and change, Schmucker said he’s only heard positive things from customers.
“People are very supportive of what we’re trying to do.”
