City’s vague rules on street sales drive food cart owner bananas

Cindy Stanleigh wants to sell her chocolate-covered fruit from a tricycle cart, but has wrestled with Toronto’s baffling laws.

Thestar.com
Aug. 22, 2016
By Jessica Botelho-urbanski

A woman who's selling chocolate-covered-frozen-banana treats by tricycle is feeling too ticked to ride as she tries to navigate what she says is the city's confusing licensing structure.

The High Park resident spent about $25,000 to get her chocolate-covered-frozen-banana-on-a-stick-treat business, coco-bananaz, up and running. After jumping through what she called too many hoops at city hall, she plans to shut down the tricycle-based operation for the season.

In a strongly worded letter to Mayor John Tory’s office, Stanleigh expressed her disillusionment.

“Toronto appears to be against innovation, against any sort of change, ‘CLOSED for business,’” she told Tory. “Why does a small entrepreneur have so much difficulty gaining access to information, markets and opportunities in this city?”

Stanleigh explained further to the Star.

“I’m totally flabbergasted," she said. “It’s a maze to try and get through, and it shouldn’t be this way. It should be clear, it should be easy, and they should give people who are trying to start small businesses access to the market.”

Stanleigh said staff in the office of Coun. Sarah Doucette (Ward 13) told her she could not sell on residential streets, which Doucette disputes. The councillor told the Star in a phone interview that her staff directed Stanleigh to listen to city staff in the Municipal Licencing and Standards office.

Stanleigh says she is unclear of the directions from staff in the licencing office. But a spokesperson for that department told the Star that Stanleigh is allowed to sell on residential streets.

“We've tried to help her. I love new entrepreneurs; I think it's a great idea," Doucette said. "We just need to make sure that she's aware of where she can and cannot sell, and that's why we put her to the people who do the licences.”

Stanleigh was told she’s not allowed to stop for “long” to sell to customers.

“I sarcastically said to (the licencing department): ‘So what do I do? Throw the bananas at people, and they’ll just throw the money back?’” Stanleigh said.

"They said “'Well, we mean you can’t stop for long.’ Well, what does that mean? Is that seven minutes? Is that 70 minutes? Long in relationship to what? It’s just too nebulous. Those are not guidelines.”

Carleton Grant, director of MLS, explained what he meant.

“Obviously you can't sell when you're riding. If she's riding in a certain area of the street and sees a group of people who kind of flag her down like a traditional ice cream truck - how they chase after them with the music - she can operate the same way,” he said. “Pulls over, sells products until that group is done, and then moves on.”

The city considers coco-bananaz essentially a mini food truck, or ice cream truck, without a motor. Stanleigh has a non-motorized, refreshment-vehicle owner licence, which doesn’t permit her to park in one spot and sell.

http://www.bar-ape.com/Bar  ApeEND, a gelato cart run by James Carnevale and Nick Genova since 2014, faced a similar struggle which they solved by upgrading to a full food-truck licence.

Their cart is built on an old-fashioned motorcycle, renovated to sell desserts. In their first year of operation, they had only an ice cream truck licence, which didn’t allow them to park in one spot and sell on major streets.

They ponied up about $4,000 for a food truck licence so they could park on major streets, Genova said. Now they have a storefront on Rushton Rd., too.

“If you have to go by food truck laws, they’re made for protecting restaurants,” said Genova.

Food trucks may park no less than 30 metres away from operating restaurants, and only two of them can park per block.

“You’d think there are a lot of spots in the city that are enough to sustain business, but there really aren’t. There are only certain hotspots, and everybody’s fighting for them,” he said.

Genova detailed his old morning routine of sleeping in his car and staking out downtown parking spots at 7 a.m., so as to get a decent spot for the rest of the day.

Between 2014 and 2015, the number of licensed food trucks and ice cream trucks jumped from 55 to 101 - a 54 per cent hike. That number is on track to surge again this year.

Along with the struggle to find a spot from which to sell their wares, food truck vendors must also pay for public health checks for their carts and commercial kitchen spaces where they prepare the food they sell from their vehicles. Stanleigh rents a kitchen space in The Junction to make her banana treats, which she sells for $4 apiece.

She said she’ll have to sell exclusively from the kitchen and do event catering for now, because the bike turned out to be a bust.

“Initially I thought, ‘Oh well, we could just boot around the city,’ and we’d be able to sell that way,” she said. “But what I’ve found was it’s so restrictive that it’s really difficult to actually sell anything.”