By Don Urquhart, Times-Chronicle
Residents of Osoyoos and points west can now tap a new grocery delivery service after independent specialty grocer Little Falls Foods expanded its service to cover a larger swath of the South Okanagan.
The seven-month-old Okanagan Falls grocer is looking to expand its market and cater to communities with no grocery delivery service, says Dahlia Millington, owner of Little Falls Foods. “I really want to reach out to seniors or those working from home or who have young children,” she says.
Their previous delivery area stretched only as far south as Oliver, but they’ve extended that with a loop to Osoyoos, Cawston, Keremeos, Olalla, Twin Lakes, and back to home base in Okanagan Falls.
Part of the decision to extend the service was based on the support they had been receiving from a number of people from Osoyoos who would order their groceries and pick them up as they swung through town, or would stop and shop as they were passing through.
Grand opening in July 2021: (l-r) Derek Millington (Dahlia’s husband), Peg (the grandmother who is the inspiration behind Rad Relish’s relish recipe), and Dahlia Millington.
The company currently offers free delivery service within a seven-kilometre radius of Okanagan Falls with a minimum $50 purchase and then a per-kilometre delivery fee outside of that circle as far north as Penticton and south to Oliver.
The maximum range incurs around a $12-13 fee and food can be delivered any day except for Sunday. For the winter season, they are also delivering up to the Apex Mountain community.
This new southern loop sees deliveries on Thursdays (with a 10 a.m. cut-off) and a flat fee of $10 with no minimum purchase. Millington says they are pleased with the response to the service which started on Jan. 6 with about half a dozen deliveries each week to Osoyoos alone which Millington says makes the service feasible already.
“It seems people are not just doing a $10 or $15 shop; they are using us for their regular groceries so we’ve already had repeat customers. We can easily accommodate 25-30 orders so we’re happy to take on more,” she laughs.
The backstory
But support hasn’t come easily, nor did it come from the quarters they expected it to. Providing a glimpse of the backstory, Millington says it was a move back to B.C. from Edmonton for her and her husband that saw this business come about.
While looking for a place in the Okanagan they could call home the couple drove through Okanagan Falls and realized that was the spot they were looking for. The pair asked around as to what the area needed and perhaps not surprisingly given the closure of the IGA in September of 2019, the answer was “a grocery store.”
With some grocery and natural foods experience in her background, Millington says she had always wanted to operate a grocery store and with the gap in Okanagan Falls it seemed a natural fit.
“We started working full force to start up the store here. We left our jobs, invested everything, shopped around to as many places as we could to get some backing.” But the financiers also warned them, saying ‘the people there won’t support you’. “And I thought that’s really crazy,” she says.
Once their funding was in order, they purchased a variety of different kinds of food that they thought seniors and everybody else would be looking for. “I like natural and organics but I got a lot of conventional groceries and those ones just sat and sat and I was sad to realize that the lenders had been right,” she says, lamenting the lack of local support.
“It was very surprising to me that after two years without a grocery store, they were resistant.” She puts this down to the fact they were possibly viewed as outsiders, partly because the store is set up as an online store and grocery warehouse making it more difficult to shop in person and because they’re primarily vegetarian and organic in focus.
Speciality but local too
But while catering to specialty diets including organic, gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, low-sugar, and keto, for instance, Little Falls Foods also stocks more ‘conventional’ food items such as bread from Oliver’s Big Al’s Bakery and Deli, dairy products from both Dairyland and Dutchman, and eggs from Westbridge (north of Rock Creek) and standard white eggs from Springhill Farms.
High-quality foodstuffs are also imported mainly from Italy and also a Chinese angle with imports from Taiwan with more to come as the grocer grows. They are also happy to hear suggestions and will do their best to bring in specific products.
Millington emphasizes they are big supporters of local farmers and food manufacturers, saying they welcome more local suppliers to add their products to the mix.
The emphasis on local products also played out positively during the disruption to supply chains from the road closures in November and December. “One of the cool things about being very tied into the local food network was that when we had that road closure, food supply chain issue we still had food on the shelves because we had local milk, we had local bread, and we had local eggs.
“And being a small store, we can pivot more quickly, so rather than getting our produce from Vancouver, we got it from Alberta. There was no point that we ran out – we brought in many, many thousands of dollars worth of milk more than normal to accommodate – and we didn’t have bare shelves at any point,” she says with pride.
Millington also dispels any notion that specialty means expensive. “Even though we are independent our prices are comparable to the big stores, not the big store sales, but the big store regular price which I think is great considering we’re just a mom-and-pop shop.”
Little Falls also offers a subscription service for any of its items and a generous awards program which ends up being about a three per cent rebate on its groceries. And with recent approval, the store can now make (and deliver) sandwiches and wraps.
“We’ve struggled but we found we’ve got a following,” she says. “We came into this business with a lot of heart and we continue to reach out to people with that same approach that we’re here to serve and be part of the community in a stabilizing way and that’s important to us.”
