Growing Community - Growing Chefs

OEV BIA
10 minutes ago
3 min read

Meet Jennifer Wyant, the executive administrator for Growing Chefs Ontario and Londonlicious, and one of our newest neighbourhood partners! Growing Chefs is a non-profit organization focused on changing the way we learn about and develop relationships with food! It was founded in 2008, modelled after the original Growing Chefs in Vancouver, though they’ve expanded their goals. They have two locations; one in the Grove, where they do most of their children’s programming, and one located at 460 King Street, in the former Auberge du Petit Prince. “We’re at a crisis stage now, where we have an entire generation that doesn’t know where their food comes from, how to make food, or source food” Wyant says. “That’s what the original Growing Chefs did, but we also have about six other branches.”

Those other arms of Growing Chefs include Growing Communities, which works with social services and other organizations to provide cooking education, a one acre farm, food boxes for families, rental space for private events, and hot lunches for daycares and area schools. Wyant says that food is what unites the world, and with dwindling food education, a sense of community is being lost. “We've become a generation that will go to Sobeys and pick up pre-made potato salad, there's no more Grandma sitting making the homemade buns,” she says. “Its what’s connecting you in a family moment, and if you don’t have that, you’re missing something.” When Growing Chefs goes to a classroom, they don’t just teach about the food itself; they go into the science behind food, the history, the geography, and how different cultures think and cook.

Another big arm in Growing Chefs is the Londonlicious Food Festival! Originally a for-profit festival, Londonlicious was taken over by Growing Chefs in 2021, with their first iteration coming in 2023. The goal was to help support restaurants, which were rebuilding after the COVID-19 pandemic. One way they did this is by cutting registration fees in half, with those fees now going directly to a marketing campaign. “There's a sliding scale of rates, but every dollar that we get from a restaurant goes right back into my marketing campaign, and we're all about transparency,” she says. “I've had some restaurants go, it actually feels like a festival now.”

Londonlicious will be running from July 24th to August 16th, featuring more than 40 restaurants, all with dishes or menus for the festival. New this year is a mandate that menus/items for Londonlicious need to have local ingredients incorporated into them, whether that’s a simple garnish, or a key part of the dish. “We live in southwestern Ontario, which is one of the most rich agricultural hubs in all of Canada, and we want to see more Ontario-grown food in Ontario,” Wyant says. “We're boosting the local economy by getting more restaurants to support more local producers, even that one little step is something.” Restaurants participating in Londonlicious range from fine dining to take-out counters, meaning there’s a price point for every restaurant goer.

So what brought Growing Chefs to the Old East Village BIA? Wyant felt that on the ground promotion and storytelling for Londonlicious was lacking, so she reached out to us, as well as the other BIAs, to cover that ground. “If we promote all of the restaurants that are in this neighborhood, we know we can get a shout out and get a lot of people if we push it through the BIA,” she says. “The whole festival affects every neighborhood. We want to draw customers from one neighborhood, like OEV, into another neighborhood, like Hyde Park, and vice versa.” This big picture approach is part of their five year plan to turn Londonlicious into a destination festival, with people coming from all over Southern Ontario to check out local eats, right here in our community.