breaking down a dream … a lesson in logistics
A little story about catering, a job that consumed my life for 30 years.
Breaking down a Dream (excerpts from my book, The Happy Cooker, not finished writing it yet) lol.
It was a recurring theme in the scheme of things. This really unique place for everyone to come and order a fantastic meal that only we could produce. The world was missing out on this gastronomical delight because we were limited in our distribution, lacking a storefront. I figured once we had the logistics solved, then the world would be our oyster. Move over Mc Donalds, there is a ‘Real beef’ sandwich in town.
We, being my then husband, and our two kids (our first work for food employees), child labour was not such a big issue back then; in fact, we just did what we had to do to pay the bills. We were not poor, but we did have to overcome some setbacks from an ill-timed venture that we invested in when the markets were at 20% interest rates. That the venture was a tire shop that was competing with Canadian Tire, was a moot point.
We sorta fell into the food business by accident, isn’t that how all good businesses start? We were broke and beaten by the tire shop. My brother-in-law had a homemade barbecue; I think everyone knows someone who has a big barbecue that can cook everything from huge chunks of meat to whole animals… lol. Well, this one could cook whole hogs on a rotisserie and was much in demand. Since we had a whole lot of time on our hands and no money, and the brother- in-law had lots of money, and no time, he hired us to go barbecue this whole hog in some godforsaken place up north.
Off we went in our camper overnight to spend the next day barbecuing this hog for a gift opening. It was boring as hell, and we were hard-pressed to fill our time while this thing was cooking (8 to 10 hours in those days). The guests would wander over and ooh and aah at this whole hog sizzling on the spit. At the end of the day, and we didn’t even have to carve it, we made over 500 dollars!
At that exact moment, this boring little job turned into a million-dollar business (I was just dreaming back then). And so started our auspicious career in catering, and notice I said OUR. It turns out, it is not only our family, but parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, and anyone even remotely related, gets rooked into helping.
Our friends always (this is where you find out who your real friends are) reluctantly came into play/work. Anyone with a pulse gets snagged, and don’t be surprised when you show up at an event, and we put an apron on you; it’s just necessary sometimes.
We ended up parting ways with the brother- in- law when he got greedy and wanted to cut me out. It had nothing to do with us almost burning his barbecue down to the ground. We then built our own, and we (well, not me because I can’t weld) built it bigger and better than his. We could cook THREE whole hogs at once in ours. Oh ya, we were going to show him, and so our adventures into catering began.
Okay, back to where I started. This recurring dream was to open up a real storefront, a turnkey operation that would not be the next Mc Donalds. We were going to serve ‘real’ down home ‘best you ever tasted’ delicious food that’ll give Mc Donalds some true competition! The people want ‘real beef’ in their bun. Beef that is barbequed for 4 to 6 hours, ‘slow roasted’ on a rotisserie barbeque, and hand-carved onto the bun! Yep, no cutting costs or corners here.
You’ve all seen the movie where the theme is “if you build it, they will come.” Well, I think there is a lot of that in all of us dreamers and entrepreneurs, and I certainly wanted to build it. I made up drawings of what the building would look like, and I even bought an old property on one of the busiest streets in the city and rented it out till I could realize my dream.
I only needed to find an architect who would work for nothing (and a piece of the pie) and then fight with City Hall about something called zoning and having enough parking stalls! Well, all I can say about that is, thank God I had renters in my property. Until they skipped out on the rent, and all that traffic going past the front door was not conducive to getting good renters anyway.
Then something magical happened: a Swiss Chalet on a really busy intersection closed down. The building was up for rent; omg IT WAS PERFECT! Well almost. I only needed to figure out how to rotate big roasts of beef in there and not chickens. The location was really busy, but only one side of the highway allowed the traffic in. That was no big deal because our food would make turning around and going out of your way to get some, that much sweeter : )
The rent was a little steep though, 10,000.00 a month (that was 25years ago), it was a lot of money. It was also a prime location, and my dream was pretty big. I could hardly sleep, and I had all sorts of plans, and I needed advice. I called the one and only Catering Guru I knew, who taught us so much over the years.
We had met him at a yearly conference of classes, lectures, and hands-on teaching, called Catersource. Mike Roman was THE MAN, and I put him on speakerphone for all of us to hear what advice he could give us to make my dream a reality. After my gushing, glowing report of what a perfect location and building and the number of thousands of vehicles that pass there each day, he asked me TWO questions: “How much was the rent?” and the second most devastating question of all…”Let me ask you, how many ‘beef on buns’ will you have to sell to pay the rent?”
Now let’s just break this down, hmmm, 10,000.00 divided by $4.00 would be 2,500 ‘beef on a bun’ a month. Divide that by 4 (weeks) would be 625 a week, which would be approx. 100 a day. That would be just to pay the rent. Let’s see, 2500 beef on a bun would require that many buns at 3.00 a dozen, then there would be the cost of about 800 lbs. of triple-A Angus beef (certified yet! No cutting corners here), and then the propane costs to barbecue it, and don’t forget the wrappers and the condiments.
Let’s see, how about the cost of staff (well, that would be free because we would be running it), now this is getting really complicated, and why do we have to pay taxes on the property when we don’t even own it? Well, needless to say, when we got off the phone, it was not pretty. Didn’t matter how we cut it, diced it, or mixed it, how much product we needed to sell to pay expenses, was the deal breaker!
Well… Some dreams are worth pursuing, and some aren’t. Some are realistic, and others are best laid to rest. I never gave up on my dream, though, I just put it on the back burner to simmer. I still bring it out every once in a while, when I see an ideal location or a perfect building or… or… or…….
copyright
February 14th, 2026
(this took place over 30 years ago)