Immigrant women are channeling their culinary traditions into thriving businesses
When Sarah Sekalala immigrated to Canada in 2001, she struggled to find the sauces and spices that made up her home culinary traditions. So the Uganda-born entrepreneur started making batches of sauces fusing spices and aromatics reflecting Uganda’s multicultural character that she could store away to feed her growing family. In 2015, she decided to channel her home recipes into Siika Sauces, a Toronto-based business focused on highlighting the traditional flavours and techniques of African cooking. Siika, which means “flavour” in her native language of Bugunda, refers both to her sauce, and to the process of cooking onion, garlic and oil with an array of spices.
In recent years, newcomers to Canada like Sekalala have played an important role in the food and accommodation sector. More than one in four workers in the food and beverage sector are immigrants, according to 2021 data from Statistics Canada. But immigrants are not only filling gaps in the sector’s workforce – they are also taking the lead in establishing their own businesses featuring foods from their home countries. A 2024 Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada study shows that immigrants now make up more than half of business owners with paid staff in the food and beverage sector, making them a force in shaping the sector.
According to Sekalala, it took her years to learn how to navigate the funding landscape as a newcomer both to Canada and the food entrepreneurship space: “It was hard to know where to start and who to go to for what.” This lack of understanding hindered her from launching Siika Sauces earlier, she says.
Alice Couderc, who became a food entrepreneur after moving to Canada from France in 2018, says navigating the world of entrepreneurship as an immigrant comes with specific challenges. In 2022, she co-founded Atome Bakery, a Vancouver-based artisanal bakery delivering French-inspired frozen bread and pastries direct to customers. She cites her relatively small professional network as being an early obstacle to success: “In France, I knew a lot of people from my city and university. But here in Canada, nobody knew my school or the companies I worked for in France…So I had to start from scratch.”
Couderc also faced challenges in proving her financial credibility to potential lenders due to a lack of previous accounts in Canada. The fact that she only had her salary from four years of working temporarily in the country to show limited her ability to access potential loans that could help take her business to the next level.
Despite these challenges, a study on the State of Women’s Entrepreneurship in 2022 by the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub found that immigrant women entrepreneurs in Canada bring unique skills and backgrounds to the table. It found that these entrepreneurs are 8.6 per cent more likely to create new products and 20.1 per cent more likely to use innovative production approaches compared to their Canadian-born counterparts.
The study suggests these entrepreneurs may have the ability to more easily notice gaps in the Canadian business landscape. In Couderc’s case, she was able to identify a new way to introduce the breads and pastries of her childhood in France to a Western Canadian clientele. “When you arrive to Canada as an immigrant, you know how it’s done somewhere else, and you notice a gap that people living here haven’t noticed,” she says. According to her, working in a city like Vancouver meant she had to think creatively about how to make her products more accessible to clients across sprawling areas.
Today, Sekalala says she sees lots of opportunities for businesses reflecting the diverse food cultures in Canada such as hers. Though it took her years to launch Siika Sauces, she says the time feels riper than ever for opening an immigrant-run food business. “It feels like I am the right seed in the right soil, being here in Canada now.” When she thinks of what this means for the future of immigrant entrepreneurs working in food, she says: “The harvest is going to be humungous.”
By Katrya Bolger, Women’s Enterprise Organizations of Canada
The WEOC National Loan Program is supporting entrepreneurs, like Sarah Sekalala and Alice Couderc, as they start and grow their innovative businesses. Find out more about this flexible loan program at www.weoc.ca/loan-program.
