Can You Deliver That Curry On A Banana Leaf?
Mark Leger is the editor of Huddle. This is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts and business news in the region.
When I think about my travel experiences, my memories often centre around great meals. An egg curry served on a banana leaf in a rural village in India. A pork dish seasoned with cumin at a seaside place in Havana. Sushi at a restaurant in Narita, Japan, the wait staff watching in amusement as I ate raw fish for the first time.
I don’t travel as much as I used to, and not at all during the pandemic. But as the Maritime region becomes more diverse through immigration, you don’t need to go far for great meals like this anymore. And though many restaurants have opened in communities around the Maritimes that serve food from a variety of cultures, much of it is also served up at farmers’ markets and food trucks by small vendors.
Of course, the pandemic has presented huge challenges for them, with markets shut down or curtailed because of restrictions, and opportunities to offer a year-round service limited if they’re based in communities with mainly outdoor summer and early fall markets.
On this week’s episode of the Huddle “Home Office” podcast, I chat with Chinweotito (Otito) Atansi and Lily Lynch, the cofounders of Sankara, an online food marketplace serving Saint John, Fredericton, Moncton and Halifax.
Otito is originally from Nigeria and Lily is from Halifax. They moved to Saint John several years ago and eventually started an African food stall at the Queen Square Farmers’ Market, surrounded by other vendors selling food from around the world.
That inspired them to create an e-commerce and marketing platform to help those kinds of vendors grow their businesses and share their food and culture more widely. Otito and Lily got their start in Saint John, but have since expanded to Fredericton, Moncton and Halifax and are a digital conduit for many businesses that sell food made by people originally from countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Through the Sankara platform, you can buy meal boxes and individual meals, but also book catering services, order specialty grocery items, and buy crafts from a variety of countries. Sankara mostly works with businesses that don’t have brick-and-mortar operations but there are larger food services and restaurants on the site too, like Taste of Egypt in Saint John.
My podcast chat with Otito made me think of a conversation I had with Susan Pass at Goods, her general store in Saint John, which I wrote about in an earlier newsletter column. Susan had told me about growing up in small-town Newfoundland, where her parents ran a small store and nearly everyone else had a small business too. Entrepreneurship was a way of life, she said, and they all supported each other’s businesses.
Otito describes life in eastern Nigeria, where he spent the first six years of his life before moving to Cameroon, in much the same way. You have to learn to make your own way, he says, and he likes to return there often to feed his entrepreneurial spirit.
“Everyone there is an entrepreneur. It’s not by choice but by default. From your grandparents all the way to the newborn, your only way out and to survive is to be an entrepreneur,” he says.
“You have to learn how to make money out of something or to create something, or to invest in something. We don’t have government subsidies there or free education…Everybody there is relentless. If you need a boost in your entrepreneurial journey you should travel to Nigeria.”
(I spent a few exhilarating days there back in 2007 and can confirm the energy is indeed infectious.)
Otito and Lily named their business after former Burkino Faso president Thomas Sankara, whom they both admire for his commitment to values they hold dear: sustainability, sharing and self-sufficiency.
“We want to build a community where everyone is accepted, where people can be themselves and use the tools that we are building to feed their families,” says Otito.
Helping them establish an e-commerce revenue stream is indeed an important tool, especially since we don’t know when, and to what degree, people will return in droves to restaurants and farmers’ markets. Even before the pandemic hit, Otito believed using Sankara’s platform was a way of reducing risks, with so many brick-and-mortar restaurants often closing after only a couple of years in business.
And our habits are changing in a way that may become permanent. I love the Caribbean-style roti and buy them regularly from Lizzie’s Trini Kitchen, which operated out of a food truck and a stall in the Saint John City Market until the pandemic. I kept sending her messages, asking when she was going to open the truck and stall again, even though she was offering a delivery service in the meantime.
I finally broke my habits and have been getting regular deliveries on Saturdays for the past four weeks. I consider myself “recurring revenue” now.
I won’t be stopping my roti deliveries any time soon, but I am craving a curry dish through Sankara. Wonder if they can serve it on a banana leaf?
Feedback on “The Saturday Huddle”? E-mail: [email protected].
Banner photo: Chef Irene Mangubat sells food through Sankara. submitted.