Toronto's Vegetable Hub : Ontario Food Terminal

Discovering the ECV market in the GTA

The Ontario food terminal is a veritable micro-city akin to no other. As the electric hand pallet trucks zoom around, one gets the impression that pedestrians are virtually foreign obstacles, hindering the precise and constant race for fresh vegetables and fruit recently in from distribution companies. If you don’t have a push cart or pallet truck, sorry, you’re way out of luck. Spinning in oblivion, you will struggle to grasp your surroundings as the locals purposefully navigate the centre in quasi-automation, pacing up and down the terminal corridors moving tonnes (literally) of fresh cargo brought in from around the province, country and world to meet the local food needs of Ontarians in general. 

Although there are distribution stalls, the real action takes place outside where, even in winter, one feels the warmth generated by the hustle and bustle of vegetable mongers navigating their baggies full of fresh produce into transport trucks, cube vans and the trunks of SUVs, rushing to supply orders at grocery stores, restaurants and eateries around the GTA and beyond. Consequently, the centre takes on the ambiance of an open-air market, not unlike those the general public would associate with more exotic destinations.

It is only once in these surroundings that one begins to appreciate how food reaches the dinner plate- and yes, although you may buy it at a supermarket the value chain involved in this transaction is not limited between you, the consumer, retailers (supermarkets) and farmers. The produce has probably changed ownership numerous times, depending on where it’s coming from, before it sits in your local supermarket’s produce aisle, ripe and tempting. It has been in the care of farmers, distributors, retailers, transporters and finally you, the consumer. It is this fluid relationship that allows box upon box of skids of produce to uniformly sit in trucks, ships and planes in an orderly, timely and well organized fashion. This flow of produce is giving way to hyperkinetic activity within Ontario, where informed farmers are taking advantage of salient opportunities presented to them in the form of ethno-cultural vegetables.

Take Bok Choy, for example. One of the major distributors receives shipments of the vegetable from right here in Ontario.  Local producers in Ontario are targeting Bok Choy, traditionally imported from Asia, in an effort to drastically curb transportation costs- and it’s working. According to Joe DaSilva, Vice President of Ippolito Produce Limited, a major distribution company at the terminal, the only time he doesn’t sell the locally produced greens is during the winter when the frost makes planting impossible. He claims other vegetables are not far behind in the race towards local production and consumption. 

It is this reality that makes ECV Ontario’s research viable- thanks to the Ontario Food Terminal we are able to eat all the fresh vegetables we want all the time, both locally and internationally grown. It is from this logistical marvel that the city of Toronto offers the province with a yearlong salad bar of nutrition and choice.  In time we can only hope that locally grown but currently imported crops get their chance to shine not only in our local supermarket shelves but also in our consumption habits and bellies, please Eat Local, and definitely Taste Global!

Steven Gitu Kangethe & Yasantha Nawaratne
ECVOntario

SEDRD

University of Guelph