Local food establishments face produce shortages

Many restaurants and cafes have been unable to receive their regular food shipments after the recent storm washed out all four highways connecting to the Lower Mainland. Highway 1 connecting to Alberta was also temporarily affected. 

Vertical Cafe is one of the businesses experiencing the consequences of the closures. Rob O’Toole, the owner of the cafe, said they are doing their best to adjust with what they have.

“All the restaurants in the village are being affected to some level,” O’Toole said. “There’s more than one major supplier, but in the end a large majority of fresh goods and things like that are coming from the Lower Mainland.”

O’Toole said he anticipates that accessing any fresh produce will be difficult over the next few days, and even possibly the next few weeks. But because Vertical Cafe does some local sourcing, they have still been able to stock up on other food such as dairy, eggs, meat and seasonal root vegetables. 

With the winter opening of Sun Peaks Resort only a couple days away, the cafe will have to adjust their menu and stop offering certain items until the issue is resolved.

“Irregardless of what’s happening on the highways, the local season’s passholder crowd will definitely be out in strong numbers over the weekend,” said O’Toole. “We anticipate being fairly busy, so we’ll just kind of take it as it comes and adjust.”

O’Toole said Vertical Cafe has a shipment coming in on Nov. 18, but mostly limited to frozen, dry and canned goods. He added that business owners in Sun Peaks are resilient, and at the end of the day it could be worse.

“You got lots of root vegetables and things like that, but you don’t have lettuce. You know, there’s people being displaced from their homes.”