BUSINESS MEMBER PROFILE
Halenda’s A Rich and Meaty History By Stacey Newman
H
alenda’s Meats is an award-winning, pioneering meat processor with locations across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Founded by Michael and Doreen Halenda as M&D’s Meats, the couple and their five children would sell small batches of smoked meat at the Oshawa Flea Market in 1977.
In 1979, the family rented a store in Oshawa in a building they would later own. They immediately built a sausage-making kitchen. They then went on to open multiple brick-and-mortar stores while continuing to process the smoked meat products they would become famous for.
Today the business is steered by their son, Richard, and the family name is known across Ontario for their award-winning Kobassa, Halenda’s fundraising Pepperoni sticks and other award-winning charcuterie and dry-cured products.
They took their sausages to St. Jacob’s, which is one of the busiest food markets in the province. Says Halenda: “Most of the vendors were from the Kitchener, Waterloo area. The sausage makers while having slightly different styles from us were also proud artisan producers.” Halenda says the family was well accepted there, which left them feeling ambitious.
Richard Halenda says his career in the business began around 1977. His father was of Ukrainian heritage, having immigrated to Canada in 1951, as a trained shoemaker (shoe repair would not turn out to be a lucrative business in Canada). Instead as a people person with a propensity for foods, he took a sales position for a small, high-quality sausage maker. “Dad worked with them through to 1977,” says Halenda. “Dad saw a business opportunity in Oshawa. He figured that with so many people of Ukrainian and Polish descent, (he was fluent in both of these languages) in this region and armed with the family Kobassa recipe, he was going to open up a stand in the Oshawa Farmers market, and he’d like me to help him,” explains Halenda. That was how it all began.
The food processing industry in the Durham region was unlike the western GTA. Probably, guesses Halenda, due to the automotive influence—it was GM’s heyday in Oshawa. The Halenda family business was popular and expansive— from storefronts to sausage kitchens, to the opening of larger processing facilities, the family successfully operated across the Durham region. In 2011 Halenda’s had expanded westward with the opening of a storefront in Mississauga, and into fermented meats like salamis following the purchase of an existing meat maker providentially named “Richard & Sons.” When the family opened its first store, there were six of them serving; exactly what his father envisioned. At that time, their marketing strategy was little more than word-of-mouth, with growth propelled by the increasing demands of regular customers. “I don’t think we advertised in the local paper [until] the nineties,” laughs Halenda. Today Halenda’s has seven locations, as well as two Halenda/ Meat Depot plants, one in Oshawa and the newest in Etobicoke. A number of Halenda’s Meats products are also sold as a part of a local program at select Metro, Foodland, Sobeys and Fortinos locations. Through the
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BlockTalk - Fall 2021
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