Wholly Veggie founders share their journey of healthy, tasty, vegan treats.

A way to eat vegan, healthy, and sustainable food while avoiding chemicals and keeping the colour! Wholly Veggie is a delicious, fun, sustainable, healthy way for people to eagerly incorporate more vegetables into their daily diets. Founders John and Dave believe that good eating is a basic human right, and Wholly Veggie is here to help! Whether it be through products or partnerships; Wholly Veggie finds fun, creative, proactive ways to bring a healthy plant based diet to your meals.

What makes Wholly Veggie stand out from other plant-based products?

Dave: The story behind Wholly Veggie is John and I met in the meat industry, and as we discovered the industry more we wanted to do something more sustainable. Originally we set out trying to do fake meat items, and we quickly realized that a lot of companies were doing the same thing; they were taking plants and trying to make them into fake meat by emulsifying them and transforming the vegetables – and for us we thought “why can’t we just make products that celebrate vegetables for what they are? Something that is clean, very simple, and adds convenience and colour to that whole category without making vegetables into something they’re not meant to be (that’s how we felt about it). So that was really how we came out as a brand, as a company that celebrated vegetables, added colour to the set, and wanted to go in a slightly different direction than what you. See today in the meat-faux category.

Your partnership with Community Food Centers Canada; what is your partnership with them and how does this encourage better eating for everybody?

John: When we first started the company Dave and I knew we wanted to align ourselves within an organization that inspired positive change in the community that we lived in and also with an organization that shares our values. So, for us, you know that that path led us to Food Community Centers Canada and if you don’t know too much about the CFTC they have 13 food centers across the country, most often in low-income areas with a focus on building health and social justice in those communities for access to good food. It’s not your traditional drop-in center for food, you know rather than getting a can of beans they actually grow their own vegetables on site – they work with local partners to get good quality food in, and also teach you how to use that food to cook and they often employ people in the local community to work in those centers. More for us, we donate a portion of our proceeds to CFTC it helps pay for the gardeners, it helps pay for some of the staff, we’re a very small contributor because we’re a small company but the goal being as we grow our level of contribution can grow as well and for us, we’ve always believed that access to good food is a universal human right. It shouldn’t be that because you don’t have much money you have to eat macaroni and cheese that’s in some box – you don’t get good vegetables and you don’t get good protein- like no, that shouldn’t be the case. It should be a universal right that everyone can have access to good food. So, that’s how our partnership started, we love everything they do and we’re actually looking for another partner like them in the United States as we begin to expand down there as well.

When you first were showing your food to the public what were some of the reactions you got to Wholly Veggies at Canadian health food show?

D: Honestly, John and I were terrified going into this event. Obviously, as entrepreneurs, you fall in love with your idea and you think you have a great idea but oftentimes that’s not necessarily how it translates when you go to market and so for us that was the big unknown, we didn’t know what the reaction would be. So we flew out, took a red eye into Vancouver stayed at somebody’s house, went to IKEA got the furniture and built a booth that night at the trade show, it was a crazy story. We showed up and we were like ‘look if nothing comes out of this will just shake hands and that was an interesting project’ but the first day we had interest in what we’re doing and we got an immediate buy-in from people and we started realizing, OK this is something that people in the industry want and are looking for. We weren’t that far off so that was fun and another big part of it was that it was our first experience. It was nerve-wracking but thankfully people responded well.

J: Yeah it’s your typical story; right when you show up, you know you don’t really know what to expect, Leading up into that moment you think you’ve made the best thing since sliced bread, but really don’t know how people are going to react. Dave helped us get into the mentality of thinking of the business as a series of milestones and as we progress for each one we reset and look at new ones to accomplish, and that’s what’s allowed us to stay focused as a group as well. A trade show is just part of that process, now we actually love it, for us tradeshows are a moment to not only interact with all of our friends in the health and wellness community, but also all the buyers who have given us a shot, there are phenomenal retailers in this country who give Canadian brands the chance to succeed. It’s a real bummer for us if you’ve seen the news that a lot of these trade shows have been cancelled this year, because nothing replaces those moments where you see your comrades and you get to hang out, have fun and blow off steam and the thing best about these shows is the endless supply of tasty food.

What’s your marketing strategy particularly towards people who are more prone to being meat eaters?

J: Our kind of view in terms of tackling the bigger issue of ‘how do we get people to add more veggies to every meal?’ is to speak not to just a vegan, not just a vegetarian, but to speak to anybody that’s looking to reduce the amount of meat in their diet with little more veggies. Our strategy is to look across every meal; breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacking, and say, “how can we make it really easy for them to get more veggies in their diet?.” So, we focus on products. The first thing to start with is on a product that is; easy to consume, is veggie-forward, and strips out any of the bad stuff Once we have the product we work with our health & wellness community, amazing influencers and ambassadors through social media and through events to get the word out and to get people trying the items. The last piece for us is in-store demonstrations, which again because those are cancelled until the new year it’s trickier, but we do rely quite a bit on our health & wellness community to amplify our brand through their network.

What are the biggest challenges you guys faced in the shift of encouraging and creating sustainable eating?

D: It’s kind of evolved in the past three years, but generally speaking there are natural barriers that people have when it comes to plant-based products. They tend to find them intimidating, there’s a perceived lack of convenience and more recently some plant-based brands are highly processed, so that tends to be part of the issue. For those who consume a lot of meat and heavily depend on it, we go with the approach that we are not telling anyone to go vegan, our goal is to encourage questioning how much meat consumption is truly needed and discover a fun and easy way to add vegetables. The meat and potatoes guys are always wary at first, but then they try them, they like it, and they enjoy knowing how the products are made and what is in them. From when we started to now, awareness as definitely increased around the plant-based food category and you’re seeing those barriers start to come down. However, there are still some and when we engage in marketing, we want consumers to never feel judged by their diets but encouraged to try more vegetables and show how easy and delicious they can be. That’s kind of how we’ve tried to tackle those barriers which were very real and still out there today but to a lesser extent.

In exploring all of this did you have any unexpected backlash or even unexpected support like a group that you thought would be a very hard sell and turns out they were your biggest fan

J: We started with the idea to find a chef who’s known for cooking with meat and our view is if we could convince that person to make something that even as a hardcore meat-eater would love, we’ve won over the toughest critic! We worked with Chef Ted to develop, we think, a phenomenal veggie burger, that event the toughest critic can love. I think that’s actually become you know a bit of a voice for us. Turning Ted into a vocal advocate for our plant-based products is something that his audience didn’t expect, we didn’t expect, but it’s gone a long way for us. So, I think sometimes as a brand you get a little bit worried to have those tough conversations, but we went ahead, and it’s been awesome for us.

What was the funniest experience you had with chef Ted when tasting your original 27 recipes?

D: There were a lot of trials and tribulations to getting the first item developed. There was late nights underneath neon lights in a basement in Scarborough at 3am. One of the funniest memories was when we were trying to determine our recipe we went to the US to get some vegan products and determine flavours we liked and didn’t like. We drove directly to chefs Ted’s house laid out all of the items, and that’s whenwe all had an “AHA” moment asking ourselves why all of the products were brown. we realized what we’re trying to do really wasn’t something that we should and there was all obviously a lot of competition for larger companies and that’s when we started exploring the notion of you know why are they all doing the same thing. It was a striking moment because it was when we decided to keep our products looking like vegetables

Business models matching missions is very crucial especially nowadays so how do you manage to maintain sustainability not only with your product but with the process that goes with it marketing, packaging, making, etc.?

J: This is something that we think about every week, and I think if as a company if you’re not thinking about your carbon footprint then you aren’t thinking like a modern brand. We didn’t start this company to make the world a worse place, we started it to make the world a better place, so we’re pretty attentive to our supply chain and one of the things that we’ve been thinking about not only with our products is how we can commit to something with our supply chain that demonstrates our ability to do a more sustainable and more focused message for customers. We’re starting the process for B-Corp, within the B-Corp process as we’re going to commit ourselves to being carbon neutral. Lastly from a sustainability perspective, not only are we working with communities here in Canada but we’re also providing some funding to help start community gardens. We wanted to help contribute back to the community.

Where can we buy Wholly Veggie??

D: We have most major grocery stores across Canada that are carrying our products today. Metro in Ontario & Québec, Save-on-Foods out West, Sobeys, Loblaws, Whole Foods, and we also obviously have a lot of fine independently owned natural food stores, which really were the launchpad for our brand and have been huge supporters of us across the country. Stores like Natures Fare in BC, in Ontario Goodness Me, Big Carrot, Fiesta Farms, Highland Farms. So, we’ve done a lot of distribution in Canada and we see a lot of support and we’ve been very grateful of that.

Store locator on the website will show you where you can purchase Wholly Veggies products.

What Products are Currently available?

J: We have a line of patties which come in Herby Garlic Greens, Sweet Curry Carrot, and a Southwest Beet. We have a line of our cauliflower and broccoli wings, which come in Buffalo, Ranch, and Kung Pao. We are currently relaunching our pizzas, with a new and improved thin crust, as well as a sweet potato crust. All of the new pizza crusts now have 50% more vegetables and will come in 5 flavours. We are also launching a new product line of easy to make, high protein plant-based meals.

What are some tips you have for people trying to eat more nutritious and sustainable?

J: The easiest way is to try and incorporate vegetables into every meal. Meal prepping can also help to ensure you have vegetables ready to use throughout the week. We also suggest being mindful about snacking, choose hummus, carrots celery instead of higher-calorie foods for snacks. It’s always just finding those moments in your day where you can add a little more veggie and we call it “veggie-fy” your meal.

D: Everyone approaches nutrition differently, it’s very challenging for a lot of people. have two young daughters, my wife works full time we’re entrepreneurs so there’s no off button, it’s always a challenge and I think that was part of why we wanted to create access to vegetables. Then we talked about a lot of things today like the community food centers; which is democratizing access to healthy food. Even in the grocery store a lot of products that are convenient are high in fat and have unrecognizable items in the ingredient list. So, everything we’ve done has been around really trying to make it easier for people and that was very personal challenge that we have in our household, so during this whole period that we’re going through right now it’s allowed us to spend even more time cooking at home which we enjoy, but in the day-to-day life is just not realistic for most people. That’s kind of what we wanted to tackle as a company.

_______________________________

What makes Wholly Veggie stand out from other plant-based products?

Your partnership with Community Food Centres Canada; what is your partnership with them and how does this encourage better eating for everybody?

John: When we first started the company Dave and I knew we wanted to align ourselves within an organization that inspired positive change in the community that we lived in and also with an organization that shares our values. So, for us, you know that that path led us to Food Community Centres Canada and if you don’t know too much about the CFTC they have 13 food centres across the country, most often in low-income areas with a focus on building health and social justice in those communities for access to good food. It’s not your traditional drop-in centre for food, you know rather than getting a can of beans they actually grow their own vegetables on site – they work with local partners to get good quality food in, and also teach you how to use that food to cook and they often employ people in the local community to work in those centres. More for us, we donate a portion of our proceeds to CFTC, it helps pay for the gardeners, it helps pay for some of the staff, we’re a very small contributor because we’re a small company but the goal being as we grow our level of contribution can grow as well and for us, we’ve always believed that access to good food is a universal human right. It shouldn’t be that because you don’t have much money you have to eat macaroni and cheese that’s in some box – you don’t get good vegetables and you don’t get good protein- like no, that shouldn’t be the case. It should be a universal right that everyone can have access to good food. So, that’s how our partnership started, we love everything they do and we’re actually looking for another partner like them in the United States as we begin to expand down there as well.

When you first were showing your food to the public what were some of the reactions you got to Wholly Veggies at Canadian health food show?

D: Honestly, John and I were terrified of going into this event. Obviously, as entrepreneurs, you fall in love with your idea and you think you have a great idea but oftentimes that’s not necessarily how it translates when you go to market and so for us that was the big unknown, we didn’t know what the reaction would be. So we flew out, took a red-eye into Vancouver stayed at somebody’s house, went to IKEA got the furniture and built a booth that night at the trade show, it was a crazy story. We showed up and we were like ‘look if nothing comes out of this will just shake hands and that was an interesting project’ but the first day we had an interest in what we’re doing and we got an immediate buy-in from people and we started realizing, OK this is something that people in the industry want and are looking for. We weren’t that far off so that was fun and another big part of it was that it was our first experience. It was nerve-wracking but thankfully people responded well.

J: Yeah it’s your typical story; right when you show up, you know you don’t really know what to expect. Leading up into that moment you think you’ve made the best thing since sliced bread, but really don’t know how people are going to react. Dave helped us get into the mentality of thinking of the business as a series of milestones and as we progress for each one we reset and look at new ones to accomplish, and that’s what’s allowed us to stay focused as a group as well. A trade show is just part of that process, now we actually love it, for us, tradeshows are a moment to not only interact with all of our friends in the health and wellness community but also all the buyers who have given us a shot, there are phenomenal retailers in this country who give Canadian brands the chance to succeed. It’s a real bummer for us if you’ve seen the news that a lot of these trade shows have been cancelled this year, because nothing replaces those moments where you see your comrades and you get to hang out, have fun and blow off steam and the thing best about these shows is the endless supply of tasty food.

What’s your marketing strategy particularly towards people who are more prone to being meat eaters?

J: Our kind of view in terms of tackling the bigger issue of ‘how do we get people to add more veggies to every meal?’ is to speak not to just a vegan, not just a vegetarian, but to speak to anybody that’s looking to reduce the amount of meat in their diet with little more veggies. Our strategy is to look across every meal; breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacking, and say, “how can we make it really easy for them to get more veggies in their diet?.” So, we focus on products. The first thing to start with is on a product that is; easy to consume, is veggie-forward, and strips out any of the bad stuff. Once we have the product we work with our health & wellness community, amazing influencers and ambassadors through social media and through events to get the word out and to get people trying the items. The last piece for us is in-store demonstrations, which again because those are cancelled until the new year it’s trickier, but we do rely quite a bit on our health & wellness community to amplify our brand through their network.

What are the biggest challenges you guys faced in the shift of encouraging and creating sustainable eatin

D: It’s kind of evolved in the past three years, but generally speaking there are natural barriers that people have when it comes to plant-based products. They tend to find them intimidating, there’s a perceived lack of convenience and more recently some plant-based brands are highly processed, so that tends to be part of the issue. For those who consume a lot of meat and heavily depend on it, we go with the approach that we are not telling anyone to go vegan, our goal is to encourage questioning how much meat consumption is truly needed and discover a fun and easy way. The meat and potatoes guys are always wary at first, but then they try them, they like it, and they enjoy knowing how the products are made and what is in them. From when we started to now, awareness as definitely increased around the plant-based food category and you’re seeing those barriers start to come down. However, there are still some and when we engage in marketing we want consumers to never feel judged by their diets but encouraged to try more vegetables and show how easy and delicious they can be. That’s kind of how we’ve tried to tackle those barriers which were very real and still out there today but to a lesser extent.

In exploring all of this did you have any unexpected backlash or even unexpected support like a group that you thought would be a very hard sell and turns out they were your biggest fan

What was the funniest experience you had with chef Ted when tasting your original 27 recipes?

D: There were a lot of trials and tribulations to getting the first item developed. There was late nights underneath neon lights in a basement in Scarborough at 3am. One of the funniest memories was when we were trying to determine our recipe we went to the US to get some vegan products and determine flavours we liked and didn’t like. On our way back we got stopped and had to explain why we had so many vegan products with us and that’s when we all had an “AHA” moment asking ourselves why all of the products were brown. We realized what we’re trying to do really wasn’t something that we should and there was all obviously a lot of competition for larger companies and that’s when we started exploring the notion of you know why are they all doing the same thing. It was a striking moment because it was when we decided to keep our products looking like vegetables.

J: This is something that we think about every week, and I think if as a company if you’re not thinking about your carbon footprint then you aren’t thinking like a modern brand. We didn’t start this company to make the world a worse place, we started it to make the world a better place, so we’re pretty attentive to our supply chain and one of the things that we’ve been thinking about not only with our products is how we can commit to something with our supply chain that demonstrates our ability to do a more sustainable and more focused message for customers. We’re starting the process for B-Corp, within the B-Corp process we’re going to commit ourselves to being carbon neutral. Lastly from a sustainability perspective, not only are we working with communities here in Canada but we’re also providing some funding to help start community gardens. We wanted to help contribute back to the community.

Where can we buy Wholly Veggie??

The Store locator on the website will show you where you can purchase Wholly Veggies products.

What Products are Currently available?

J: We have a line of patties that come in Herby Garlic Greens, Sweet Curry Carrot, and a Southwest Beet. We have a line of our cauliflower and broccoli wings which come in Buffalo, Ranch, and Kung Pao. We are currently relaunching our pizzas with a new and improved thin crust, as well as a sweet potato crust. All of the new pizza crusts now have 50% more vegetables and will come in 5 flavours. We are also launching a new product line of easy to make, high protein plant-based meals.

What are some tips you have for people trying to eat more nutritious and sustainable?

D: Everyone approaches nutrition differently, it’s very challenging for a lot of people. I have two young daughters, my wife works full time, we’re entrepreneurs so there’s no off button, it’s always a challenge and I think that was part of why we wanted to create access to vegetables. Then we talked about a lot of things today like the community food centers; which is democratizing access to healthy food. Even in the grocery store a lot of products that are convenient are high in fat and have unrecognizable items in the ingredient list. So, everything we’ve done has been around really trying to make it easier for people and that was very personal challenge that we have in our household, so during this whole period that we’re going through right now it’s allowed us to spend even more time cooking at home which we enjoy, but in the day-to-day life is just not realistic for most people. That’s kind of what we wanted to tackle as a company.

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