Though the COVID-19 pandemic is often thought of being destructive for businesses, some actually thrived because of it. Their futures are now uncertain as the province reopens and they learn whether their new customers will keep coming.
Growing up in restaurant families, the young co-founders of a new food ordering app know how hard it is for mom-and-pop shops to compete with big chains. That’s why the four U of T students…
Restaurants in Toronto are providing free meals to frontline health-care workers through a new organization called Feed the Frontlines T.O. It’s helping them stay in business during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dire predictions on the odds of restaurants surviving the winter continue to dominate the news as the pandemic drags on. Restaurants Canada estimates that since the start of the pandemic, 33,000 jobs in Toronto have been lost and full-service restaurants are experiencing as much as 80 per cent of sales losses due to the shutdown of indoor dining. And yet, despite the economic uncertainty and bad news, there are still restaurants popping up around Toronto.
When Ontario went into lockdown in mid-March, 2020 due to the pandemic, bartender Marko Yovanovich lost his full-time job. He had worked at Trinity Common in Toronto’s Kensington Market for a year. The next day, Yovanovich started his own business: Food Group Catering. The restaurant industry, which had to shut down in March and April, still had 250,000 people out of work in October, 2020 according to a recent study. Ontario and Quebec were impacted most drastically.