"Charlotte County Challa Bread" by Bread Riding Hood. Image: Shannon-May Pringle
A new business that launched in the middle of COVID-19 lockdown is bringing locally-sourced groceries to New Brunswickers’ doors every week.
Fundy Market is an online store that offers food, artisan and household products from local producers and delivers them to customer’s doors once a week. The business currently serves Saint John, Fredericton, Harvey, Charlotte County and Hanwell.
The business was the idea of Heather Almeda, who was the runs Fundy Soap Company and a vegan baking business called Heather’s Wholefood Bakery in St. Stephen. Originally, she had the vision to create a low-waste grocery store selling local food.
“So, for example, there are lots of amazing food vendors in Fredericton that wouldn’t be at the Farmers Market in St. Stephen and there are lots of amazing vendors here that can only attend the St. Stephen market and they can’t travel to all kinds,” says Almeda. “So I had an idea to coordinate those vendors and help them reach new markets.”
In February, Almeda, with the help of her friend and fellow small business owner Zoe Fitch, started the get the ball rolling on setting up a physical location.
Then COVID-19 happened.
“All of a sudden there became a serious need for people to be able to get food delivered to their home,” says Almeda. “We just decided, what the heck? We’re going to do this. We’ll just push forward and we’ll have a website and we’ll organize a lot of different food vendors to create an online market that would be delivered.”
Fundy Market carries everything from meat, seafood, vegetables, bread, sauces, pasta, snacks, coffee, housekeeping products, stationery, and artisanal works.
“Basically anything you could find at the grocery store you could find through our market,” says Almeda.
It works like this: On Fridays Fundy Market opens up its online orders to customers. Orders must be placed before Monday at 11:59 p.m. to ensure it’s delivered that week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, Fundy Market notifies its vendors of the orders placed. The vendors then arrange the drop-off or pick up of their products. From there, Fundy Market packs the orders and on Thursday and Fridays, St. Stephen-based Source One Supplies picks up the orders and delivers them to customer’s doors.
Fundy Market launched May 1 and has exceeded Almeda and Fitch’s expectations
“Once we got up and running, we were anticipating maybe 25 orders for our first week, and in our first week, we had 41. It was amazing,” says Almeda. “It really shows how many people in New Brunswick want to be able to source food from their own province. Especially with food security coming up and being a questionable thing with food coming from all around the world and those things being disrupted and delayed, so it’s been nice to fill that niche.”
Customers also appreciate being able to find some of their favourite local foods in one place.
“I’ve found that a lot of our customers say they’ve been travelling to lots of different places to be able to get their groceries,” says Almeda. “They’d go to one spot to get their meat and then they go to one spot to get their bread, and they’d go to all these different little shops around their area so they could get these things that they felt were ethically sourced or fair. Now, it’s really convenient because it can just be delivered right to their door.”
Currently, Fundy Market is run out of Almeda’s mother’s basement, with a fridge and two tables from a church. Looking ahead, she would like to expand service to Moncton, as well as secure a permanent location which includes a licensed kitchen.
“A lot of our vendors are based out of a home kitchen and you can’t sell food online and take orders unless you’re based out of a commercial kitchen,” she says.
“So, unfortunately, we had to turn away a lot of local favourites because they cannot sell online due to food standards. So we would love to one day have a space that we could rent out to help prop other people’s businesses up and share that amongst food vendors and have a physical space.”
Cherise Letson is the associate editor of Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
