Feedery offers something for everyone – under one roof

July 13, 2023 · 0 Comments

You know the nightly routine – trying to figure out what everyone at home wants for dinner.

Chances are, finding one restaurant to satisfy everyone is easier said than done and could result in multiple orders, multiple delivery times, and, worst of all, multiple sets of delivery fees.

Doing away with all that and offering a menu to suit even the most finicky of tastebuds was the vision behind Feedery, a unique dining experience in Aurora that celebrated its first anniversary earlier this year.

Located on Yonge Street at Golf Links Drive, Feedery is, at any one time, four restaurants in one: Chomp Shop, offering handcrafted fried chicken options; Smash Patties, serving up American-style smashed hamburgers; Soul Bowl, specializing in healthy and nutritious and lighter meals; and Onokai Poke Fiesta, which takes the Hawaiian favourite and infuses it with Latin flavours.

“Imagine in your household or any family – a husband, a wife, a kid or two – decide to order. If not everybody wants the same thing, they have to do the following: they have to order from two or three different places, have two or three delivery times, they might not even eat together – that’s barring any issues with their delivery, and they have to pay multiple delivery fees. We said this would be an interesting problem to solve,” says Feedery co-founder Guillermo Russo. “No more delivery fees, no more three waiting times, and everybody can eat together at the table.”

Feedery was designed by the team at the height of the pandemic.

During that difficult time, they bounced around many different ideas on what the model might look like and even if the timing was right.

“All roads led to us giving it a shot,” he said. “We took the majority of the time during COVID to design the concept, do all of the branding around it, work on recipes. When we were done, the pandemic was still around and we decided to give it a go anyway. We gambled, we executed the concept, and we built towards the tail end of the pandemic, which was good because things started coming back to life.

“Throughout, it has remained true to what we designed it to be, which is a place where everyone in the family could find something to eat. A key aspect of what we wanted to do was make everything fresh in house. Whereas at some quick service concepts, a lot of them have prefabricated product and it either comes frozen or in a squeeze bottle ready to serve, we wanted to change that aspect – quick service, but with ingredients that are honourable and of quality. We don’t work with frozen products, nobody manufactures our sauces, dressings or marinades – we do it all ourselves.”

With four concepts available all the time – along with partnerships with other food artisans they bring in for special sales, promotions and products, such as Kats Cookies and Gaucho Pie Co., the concept is just as fresh as their food.

Some pop-ups have included a traditional deli set-up with Mustard Brothers Deli and, more recently, the Jamaican food concept called Papa Chows.

“In that way, we’re also an incubator for smaller brands that want to test the market and just offer something different that we don’t have on our menu,” says Russo. “Feedery, as we see it, is a very dynamic space. We have these four core brands that we developed and we developed more that we’re slowly going to introduce. As well, we have partners where we sell their items, mostly on a retail point of view, and then we have these pop-ups that come in from time to time and offer something that may not be super-available in the area.

“We’re a multi-concept quick service restaurant where we have developed these brands, taken the time to do all the branding, all the recipe development, where all the ingredients are purchased fresh, transformed in house, not manufactured by a random third party, so the quality is always there, it’s always good, it’s always honourable.”

By Brock Weir