Crissy Ventura passes an inch-thick puck of dough through a commercial sheeter, a stainless-steel box with a spinning cylinder attached to it that flattens the dough until it\u2019s as thin as a tortilla. <\/p>\n
This stage of making her famous pork steamed buns used to be tedious, back-breaking labour when all she had was a rolling pin. Back then, Ms. Ventura, a Filipino immigrant in the Halifax suburb of Lower Sackville, N.S., made about 120 buns each week. <\/p>\n
The orders came in exclusively through Facebook Marketplace, and she\u2019d sell the buns by the dozen. <\/p>\n
But then she heard about a health inspector visiting the apartment of a woman running a similar operation in Halifax and fining her $2,000. It spooked Ms. Ventura enough to shut down her venture, which was technically illegal.<\/p>\n
Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Ms. Ventura started off selling around 120 buns per week out of her home. Her business has now evolved into a lucrative, full-time gigDarren Calabrese\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n It was a blessing in disguise, prompting her to enroll in a free program designed to help women from under-represented groups professionalize their food businesses. Three years later, her business has evolved into a lucrative, full-time gig.<\/p>\n Since the pandemic, health inspectors across the country have been cracking down on unlicensed home cooking operations that sell dishes including Nigerian jollof, South Indian Chicken 65 and Palestinian musakhan through informal channels such as WhatsApp or Facebook Marketplace. <\/p>\n But in that same period, a range of programs have launched across the country to help the women \u2013 many of whom are newcomers \u2013 register their food businesses, learn to use commercial kitchens and make their operations more profitable while still using social platforms to advertise their products.<\/p>\n In spring 2020, when the pandemic brought many restaurants and catering businesses to a standstill, Nova Scotia\u2019s Centre for Women in Business was inundated with calls. Women, the majority of them immigrants, were panicked about how they had no way to make money since stay-at-home orders and social-distancing rules meant their food businesses could no longer operate.<\/p>\n Natalie Frederick-Wilson, who works for the centre, soon learned that all the callers were operating on the black market: no business registration, no insurance, no food safety licence. <\/p>\n \u201cThese women were running these businesses out of their house for five, 10 years, and COVID revealed there was a very broken system,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen people operate outside of the main economy, they\u2019re trying to pay the bills, they\u2019re not trying to break the law.\u201d<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Trixie Ling, founder of Dream Cuisines, and cafe helper, Darryl Huet, speak with customers at the Flavours of Hope Cafe in Vancouver’s Granville Island Public Market. Dream Cuisines is a mentorship and training program for newcomer women food entrepreneurs.Felicia Chang\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n She and her team dreamed up SPICE, short for the Specialized Program in Cooking Entrepreneurship, and launched it in 2023: an eight-week curriculum, which receives funding from the federal and provincial governments as well as local businesses.<\/p>\n It helps participants register their businesses, receive food safety training and connect with local partners such as stores and farmers\u2019 markets to sell their products. The women are also given access to a commercial kitchen at a discounted hourly rate and mentored by professional chefs. To date, 50 participants have completed the course.<\/p>\n Across Canada, free programs such as SPICE are popping up to bring the primarily immigrant women running these businesses out of the black market and into the legal one. <\/p>\n Last year, Immigrant Women Services Ottawa launched its three-month Culinary Entrepreneur Program, which runs throughout the year. In February, the federal government gave $2-million to Toronto\u2019s Foodpreneur Lab, a non-profit that helps scale up food businesses run by individuals who have faced systemic barriers. And in Vancouver, the Dream Cuisines program, created by the non-profit Flavours of Hope, announced the sixth annual cohort of its mentorship and training program for newcomer women food entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n Through SPICE, Ms. Ventura, now a licensed food operator who runs Pinoys Best, received a grant that helped her purchase a proofer to help her bun dough rise, a meat slicer and a dough sheeter, all of which increased her efficiency and scaled up her production. On some weekends, she sells as many as 285 steamed pork buns at Halifax\u2019s Seaport Farmers\u2019 Market, and now also sells pork dumplings, chicken rice noodles, spring rolls and chili oil, as well as frozen snacks at a boutique grocery store downtown.<\/p>\n Ms. Ventura has been able to scale up her production, oftentimes more than doubling what she used to sell before receiving help from SPICE.<\/p>\n Darren Calabrese\/THE GLOBE AND MAIL<\/p>\n In 2022, she sold the pork steamed buns for $2 each, but she has steadily raised the price. Now they\u2019re $6 each to properly account for the cost of ingredients, equipment, labour and part-time staff.<\/p>\n Her monthly sales increased by 55 per cent from the year before she started the program to the year after she completed it. She\u2019s earned enough to build a licensed commercial kitchen in her basement and, this spring, she purchased a food truck, from which she sells Filipino food several days a week. <\/p>\n Sandra Garcia, another participant in the program, had her own moment of getting spooked into professionalizing her small business, Naguar\u00e1 Venezuelan Food, in 2024. Ms. Garcia, who was a new immigrant in Halifax, connected with small groups of other Latin American women and advertised the empanadas, arepas and teque\u00f1os she made at home through messages shared on WhatsApp with her phone number and e-mail address. <\/p>\n One day, she received an e-mail from a provincial health inspector, saying they\u2019d received a complaint about her operating without a licence and outlining what she had to do to sell her food legally.<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Owner and operator of Naguara Halifax, Sandra Garcia, originally from Venezuela, makes empanadas while preparing for the weekend market in Halifax.Darren Calabrese\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n Last year, Nova Scotia received 25 complaints about food being prepared or sold from private dwellings without a permit. Depending on the risk level to the public, sometimes officials take enforcement action, but their initial priority is education to help operators comply with the law, according to Edison Skinner, a spokesperson from the province\u2019s Department of Agriculture. <\/p>\n Toronto Public Health, meanwhile, received 65 complaints related to unlicensed food operators last year, up from just 20 in 2022. <\/p>\n In British Columbia, Fraser Health has received 46 complaints so far for the 2025-26 fiscal year and has issued eight fines ranging from $200 to $345. Last fall, the public health unit issued a public service announcement warning residents of the risks involved with buying food from unlicensed operators, such as contracting foodborne illnesses. <\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Ms. Garcia now factors in the cost of fuel, electricity and her own labour when pricing her food items.Darren Calabrese\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n For Ms. Garcia, the most eye-opening moment for her during the SPICE program was learning to log expenses beyond the tangible things such as ingredients and packaging. She\u2019d spend hours each week driving all over the city to Walmart, Costco and beyond to find the best prices for the beef, black beans and corn flour she used in her products, and then many more hours preparing them in the kitchen. <\/p>\n She, like so many other participants, never thought about the cost of fuel, of electricity and, most importantly, her own labour. She\u2019s learned how to claim those expenses when she files her business taxes, and now builds those intangible costs into her pricing.<\/p>\n \u201cYour work is the most expensive of all the ingredients,\u201d Ms. Garcia says. Instead of chasing sales week to week, she now purchases ingredients from wholesalers and produces at a large-enough volume that she even has a local cheesemonger preparing akkawi cheese in a particular shape for her to use in her teque\u00f1os.<\/p>\n Underpricing products is a recurring issue Trixie Ling, the founder of Dream Cuisines in Vancouver, has seen among participants. It\u2019s not just because they haven\u2019t accounted for their labour, but because \u201cthere\u2019s this understanding, especially when it comes to cultural food, that it should be cheaper,\u201d Ms. Ling says. \u201cThis is where racism comes into play.\u201d<\/p>\n