The flavours of Facebook Marketplace are unregulated | Canada Voices

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. Ventura enough to shut down her venture, which was technically illegal.

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.

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.

But in that same period, a range of programs have launched across the country to help the women – many of whom are newcomers – register their food businesses, learn to use commercial kitchens and make their operations more profitable while still using social platforms to advertise their products.

In spring 2020, when the pandemic brought many restaurants and catering businesses to a standstill, Nova Scotia’s 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.

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.

“These women were running these businesses out of their house for five, 10 years, and COVID revealed there was a very broken system,” she says. “When people operate outside of the main economy, they’re trying to pay the bills, they’re not trying to break the law.”

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.

It helps participants register their businesses, receive food safety training and connect with local partners such as stores and farmers’ 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.

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.

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’s 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.

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’s Seaport Farmers’ 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.

In 2022, she sold the pork steamed buns for $2 each, but she has steadily raised the price. Now they’re $6 each to properly account for the cost of ingredients, equipment, labour and part-time staff.

Her monthly sales increased by 55 per cent from the year before she started the program to the year after she completed it. She’s 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.

Sandra Garcia, another participant in the program, had her own moment of getting spooked into professionalizing her small business, Naguará 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 tequeños she made at home through messages shared on WhatsApp with her phone number and e-mail address.

One day, she received an e-mail from a provincial health inspector, saying they’d received a complaint about her operating without a licence and outlining what she had to do to sell her food legally.

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’s Department of Agriculture.

Toronto Public Health, meanwhile, received 65 complaints related to unlicensed food operators last year, up from just 20 in 2022.

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.

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’d 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.

She, like so many other participants, never thought about the cost of fuel, of electricity and, most importantly, her own labour. She’s learned how to claim those expenses when she files her business taxes, and now builds those intangible costs into her pricing.

“Your work is the most expensive of all the ingredients,” 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 tequeños.

Underpricing products is a recurring issue Trixie Ling, the founder of Dream Cuisines in Vancouver, has seen among participants. It’s not just because they haven’t accounted for their labour, but because “there’s this understanding, especially when it comes to cultural food, that it should be cheaper,” Ms. Ling says. “This is where racism comes into play.”

The program introduces participants to food inspectors, so they can learn to trust them instead of fear them, Ms. Ling says, and also offers the women spots in Vancouver farmers’ markets so they can expand their customer base beyond their own cultural communities.

Most of the women in the program are mothers, Ms. Ling says, and many have turned a part-time hobby into full-time work. Two graduates from the program are now the sole breadwinners for their families.

Vinaya Waghmode, who grew up in India and trained as an engineer before getting her MBA, made a midlife pivot and went to pastry school in France in 2019.

She got a job at a bakery in Vancouver but dreamed of her own operation selling buns made with brioche dough and laminated pastries that captured the flavours of her favourite dishes growing up in Mumbai.

She took a break from working when she had a baby. When her child turned 1, she thought about starting her own patisserie and applied to Dream Cuisines to figure out how to launch her business.

Through the program, she met many mentors, other immigrant women with established food businesses who offered guidance on how to run a successful tent at the farmers’ market and how to highlight the French techniques and unusual flavour profiles that made her pastries stand out.

When Ms. Waghmode started selling at the farmers’ market under the name Elaichi Patisserie in 2023, she pulled in about $400 to $500 in sales each market day. Now, she sells about $2,000 worth of pastries on each market day, has wholesale contracts with a few cafés in the city and employs two full-time staff.

Some of her bestsellers are a chutney cheese sandwich-inspired croissant, a cake with the flavours of pistachio kulfi and a lemon tart crowned with a fried ring of motichoor ladoo, a sweet made with chickpea flour and saffron syrup.

This year, she’s a mentor in the program and has put her expertise in safety and food handling to good use. When her mentee expressed interest in selling her meat dishes with hot rice, “I told her, ‘Listen, logistics-wise, it will be a little bit difficult if you want to go all in with that, because you have to heat up the rice, you need to carry the equipment, you need to have a hot water station to wash your hands,’ ” Ms. Waghmode recounts.

“It’s something she didn’t know, but because I’ve been at the market, I know.”