The pandemic has been hard on restaurants, as physical distancing requirements have led to many of them having to shut their doors, and do their best to stay alive however they can.
Yet COVID-19 lockdowns have also presented an opportunity for some. Pizza consumption has surged during the pandemic. And rather than bringing the family down to the local pizza place, Canadians have moved in droves toward making the frozen variety the pie of choice.
According to market research firm Nielsen, frozen pizza sales rose 20 per cent in the year up to the middle of March to reach $650 million across the country. Sales of premade crusts and do-it-yourself dough are up even more.
Nearly three-quarters of all Canadian households bought some sort of do-it-yourself pizza this year, and online sale are way up, according to Nielsen.
Family business
Archie’s Pizza in Starbuck, Man., just outside of Winnipeg, sold a big slice of them.
Originally started by Archie Mollot in the 1930s, his grandson Phil Mollot is now one of the owners of the family business. Over the years, it’s evolved from a meat business into more of a pizza-selling empire.
That transition started about 20 years ago as a small side business, but now selling pies is about two-thirds of their revenue.
“We were selling … about three times more than usual for a month and a half to three months at least,” the younger Mollot says of his experience in the spring of 2020, when COVID-19 lockdowns swept across Canada
Even after settling down from those crazy early pandemic days, today the business is still selling about 15 per cent more than it was before this all started. Archie-made pizzas are now sold in 25 stores across Manitoba, from Winnipeg, to Brandon, to Portage, and all points in between.
While he’s glad to be busy, that growth has come with challenges as it was hard to keep up with demand.
General Assembly Pizza in Toronto pivoted away from in-person dining early in the pandemic in favour of making frozen pizza kits that customers could cook at home. (Jacqueline Hansen/CBC)
“We’ve learned a lot and we could handle a third wave, but I don’t see it being anything like like the first one. I think that was just people not understanding that we’re not going to run out of food.”
Growing trend
Archie’s pizza isn’t the only one seeing a surge in demand from hungry customers.
Toronto restauranteur Ali Khan Lalani said he was scared, last March, when he had to close his newly opened pizza place, General Assembly Pizza, because of the pandemic, not really knowing when he could open up again.
But on a trip to the grocery store getting food for his family, he noticed the store was limiting frozen pizza sales to four per customer. That gave him an idea: he could use his restaurant’s ample space to make pizzas that his customers could have delivered to cook and eat at home.
“We took off our restaurant hats and we put on our grocery hats,” he said in an interview.
“We’ve got the dough, we’ve got the cheese, we’ve got the sauce. Let’s try to roll out a pizza kit. We actually launched the pizza kit on the third day after everyone closed and we were overwhelmed by the response.”
A year ago he was a restaurant owner, but today Lalani is the head of a direct-to-consumer subscription service, selling customizable packs that will deliver up to 10 of his half dozen flavours of pizza a month to his customers.
Toronto restauranteur Ali Khan Lalani says even after the pandemic allows for in person dining again, delivering frozen pizzas straight to customer homes will be the majority of his restaurant’s business. (Jacqueline Hansen/CBC)
The idea has been such a success that he’s now trying to expand to bigger locations around Toronto and beyond. The company recently tried to raise $3.5 million to fund expansion plans, and investor appetite was so great they ended up taking in $13 million. Now they’re planning to go public on the Toronto Stock Exchange as soon as this year. That could provide the capital to make General Assembly pizzas be available across Canada — if not the world.
“I was blown away and I feel extremely fortunate and humbled to have that much interest in our business and what we were doing” he said.
That interest comes as no surprise to Jonathan Waze, the editor of Restaurant Business, an industry trade publication based in Minneapolis.
In an interview, he said he’s not surprised to see the pizza business is booming in this pandemic-induced era where everyone is even more online than usual, since it has a long history of being far more technologically savvy than most other types of restaurants.
“Go back to the ’90s and pizza chains were actually the first restaurants to really embrace the web as a source of sales and ordering,” Waze said.
Though bare bones, customers could type in a order, phone number and address and get a pizza delivered. Few did at the time, but it’s hard to imagine a successful restaurant business that hasn’t fully embraced the internet now.
Waze says many parts of the food industry have been seeking to move more into direct-to-consumer selling, and away from physical locations, and the pandemic may have presented the pizza industry with the perfect opportunity to push harder in that direction.
“It’s fascinating,” Waze said of the type of subscription service that Lalani is pioneering. “I don’t see any reason why something like this can’t work.”
It’s the future
While he’s as surprised as anyone to go from making pizzas to becoming what he calls a “data driven e-commerce business” ultimately Lalani says he’s still a restauranteur at heart. He can’t wait for the day when he’ll get to reopen his flagship location in downtown Toronto to diners wishing to eat in again.
But with all he’s learned, he knows the direct-to-consumer model is the future. He’s all for it.
“The frozen pizza business is a $17 billion … a year business in North America,” he said. “And we just want our slice.”
CALGARY – TC Energy Corp. has lowered the estimated cost of its Southeast Gateway pipeline project in Mexico.
It says it now expects the project to cost between US$3.9 billion and US$4.1 billion compared with its original estimate of US$4.5 billion.
The change came as the company reported a third-quarter profit attributable to common shareholders of C$1.46 billion or $1.40 per share compared with a loss of C$197 million or 19 cents per share in the same quarter last year.
Revenue for the quarter ended Sept. 30 totalled C$4.08 billion, up from C$3.94 billion in the third quarter of 2023.
TC Energy says its comparable earnings for its latest quarter amounted to C$1.03 per share compared with C$1.00 per share a year earlier.
The average analyst estimate had been for a profit of 95 cents per share, according to LSEG Data & Analytics.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
BCE Inc. reported a loss in its latest quarter as it recorded $2.11 billion in asset impairment charges, mainly related to Bell Media’s TV and radio properties.
The company says its net loss attributable to common shareholders amounted to $1.24 billion or $1.36 per share for the quarter ended Sept. 30 compared with a profit of $640 million or 70 cents per share a year earlier.
On an adjusted basis, BCE says it earned 75 cents per share in its latest quarter compared with an adjusted profit of 81 cents per share in the same quarter last year.
“Bell’s results for the third quarter demonstrate that we are disciplined in our pursuit of profitable growth in an intensely competitive environment,” BCE chief executive Mirko Bibic said in a statement.
“Our focus this quarter, and throughout 2024, has been to attract higher-margin subscribers and reduce costs to help offset short-term revenue impacts from sustained competitive pricing pressures, slow economic growth and a media advertising market that is in transition.”
Operating revenue for the quarter totalled $5.97 billion, down from $6.08 billion in its third quarter of 2023.
BCE also said it now expects its revenue for 2024 to fall about 1.5 per cent compared with earlier guidance for an increase of zero to four per cent.
The company says the change comes as it faces lower-than-anticipated wireless product revenue and sustained pressure on wireless prices.
BCE added 33,111 net postpaid mobile phone subscribers, down 76.8 per cent from the same period last year, which was the company’s second-best performance on the metric since 2010.
It says the drop was driven by higher customer churn — a measure of subscribers who cancelled their service — amid greater competitive activity and promotional offer intensity. BCE’s monthly churn rate for the category was 1.28 per cent, up from 1.1 per cent during its previous third quarter.
The company also saw 11.6 per cent fewer gross subscriber activations “due to more targeted promotional offers and mobile device discounting compared to last year.”
Bell’s wireless mobile phone average revenue per user was $58.26, down 3.4 per cent from $60.28 in the third quarter of the prior year.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
TORONTO – Cineplex Inc. reported a loss in its latest quarter compared with a profit a year ago as it was hit by a fine for deceptive marketing practices imposed by the Competition Tribunal.
The movie theatre company says it lost $24.7 million or 39 cents per diluted share for the quarter ended Sept. 30 compared with a profit of $29.7 million or 40 cents per diluted share a year earlier.
The results in the most recent quarter included a $39.2-million provision related to the Competition Tribunal decision, which Cineplex is appealing.
The Competition Bureau accused the company of misleading theatregoers by not immediately presenting them with the full price of a movie ticket when they purchased seats online, a view the company has rejected.
Revenue for the quarter totalled $395.6 million, down from $414.5 million in the same quarter last year, while theatre attendance totalled 13.3 million for the quarter compared with nearly 15.7 million a year earlier.
Box office revenue per patron in the quarter climbed to $13.19 compared with $12 in the same quarter last year, while concession revenue per patron amounted to $9.85, up from $8.44 a year ago.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.
