The flavours of Facebook Marketplace are unregulated
Crissy Ventura, a Filipino immigrant in Nova Scotia, transitioned from selling pork steamed buns informally through Facebook Marketplace to running a licensed food business. This change was prompted by increased scrutiny from health inspectors during the pandemic, which led her to enroll in a program aimed at helping women professionalize their food ventures. Similar initiatives across Canada are supporting immigrant women in moving their home-based food businesses into the legal market.
- ▪Crissy Ventura initially sold around 120 buns per week from her home before shutting down due to health inspector fines.
- ▪The pandemic led to a crackdown on unlicensed home cooking operations, prompting many women to seek support for their businesses.
- ▪Programs like SPICE are helping immigrant women register their food businesses and access resources to operate legally.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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’s as thin as a tortilla. 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. The orders came in exclusively through Facebook Marketplace, and she’d sell the buns by the dozen. 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.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Globe and Mail.
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