The following is taken from a transcript of the remarks by Executive Chef Suman Roy, speaking at the SBA’s February Food Festival in Feb. 2021
A huge thanks to Scarborough Business Association for putting this together. I think everybody will agree that our industry – the food and beverage industry – has been hit really, really hard due to pandemic and this industry will not survive without the support of organizations like the SBA. That is a very key thing to understand because most restaurants = and I’m talking individual restaurants – are barely breaking even in the best of times. They are barely hanging on with a thin thread.
If anybody says to the restaurant industry “you can sit on money’ I don’t know which world they come from. The profit margin if you’re running a good small restaurant it may be three to four percent. In the middle of pandemic with everything that is happening I can only Imagine.
I used to own three restaurants. I am lucky I don’t own them now. This was way before pandemic. I wouldn’t know what to do at this point.
There are certain things that we need to talk about. We need to support our restaurants. We need to order take out food. These steps are absolutely great what I really want to focus on is a more systemic solution. There are two systemic issues that i see right now in North America. We live in a cheap food world and we live in a cheap food mentality. This is a huge problem for the whole industry – not only just restaurants but for the fruit producers to the farmers to everybody. We need to understand as a community that we cannot accept these cheap food mentalities. Why is it that when i walk into a grocery store I see 30 cents to 50 cents for a Kraft Dinner box but almost a 70 cents for piece of apple or a pear. It does not make sense to me at all.
I’m going to bring it back to the restaurant industry here because i think what we really need as an a organization like SBA and all of us together is talk about a systemic change that needs to happen. Let me just bring it back to the pandemic for to a few minutes. Earlier when i came to speak to this to this group I predicted a 35 to 40 percent loss of restaurants by the end of the Pandemic in Scarborough itself. We are not even close to the end now we are talking about a third wave coming in April and we have already lost over 20 percent of restaurants in Scarborough. So, my prediction was wrong. I am now talking about probably a 50 per cent loss if we do not act properly and we do not act together.
This lies not only as the responsibility of the SBA or the community. It lies with our three levels of governments. There needs to be policy changes that will actually help the small businesses. I’ll provide a small example: I know when I always talk about this I have my friends in the municipality who says oh ‘we’re going to wait for (Prime Minister Justin) Trudeau to give more rent benefits.’
OK, however. every level has this responsibility. Why is it that a landlord is able to keep the place vacant and make money on taxes rather than give it cheaper for a place to run for a few months. There is a systemic problem. Why are there vacant storefronts sitting for years and it’s still profitable for the landlord?
Make a little concession for a small business to open these storefronts. We need to have these policy discussions and it lies with all the three levels of government.
I really urge the SBA to take on these policy discussions and push it from a policy standpoint on where we can systematically make a long-term difference. It is not just a pandemic that is going to cause to take us three four years to really come back. It’s going to be so expensive to the livelihood for thousands and thousands of Scarborough residents. Their livelihoods are going to be lost and we cannot afford that. We need action Immediately and I look at all our elected officials. The Scarborough food security initiative very recently did a session in southwest Scarborough with all three levels of government and I think we need to have more conversations like this and talk systematically how we can actually support this industry.
It is not about the cheapest food, it is about the good food and how we as consumers have power. We have two major powers in our hands. One is our vote and two is our wallets. We can use both these to actually make our community a better place.