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At the corner of George and Parkhill, you might have noticed a green sign advertising a new business: Fresh Foodz.
Fresh Foodz is an Indian-Canadian grocery store owned and operated by Sai Kafelnikov Inturi and Manikanta Reddy, who both came to Canada as international students. They’ve been friends for a couple of years, Inturi says, and they recently decided they wanted to go into business together.
Having settled on the idea of opening an Indian grocery store, the friends then needed to decide where to locate. Inturi had just finished grad school at the University of Windsor, and he was living in Toronto at the time. But the business partners ultimately decided on Peterborough as the best place to set up shop. “There’s a lot of Indian students,” in Peterborough, Inturi explains. But “there is no Indian grocery store” like Fine Foodz in the city, he says, and so they saw an opportunity.
“I spoke to friends who studied here in Peterborough and Lindsay, and they told me what it’s like here, how the people react to Indian customers and Indian food. That made me interested in starting an Indian grocery store in Peterborough.”
While the entrepreneurs hope the local Indian student population shops at their store, they also think Fine Foodz will appeal to the broader community.
Right now, the main thing the store offers are dry goods like rice, spices and other staples. But soon they’ll be opening a butcher counter and stocking the store with fruits and vegetables, too, Inturi says.
“I want to make all my customers very happy,” Inturi says. “I want them to find everything in our store useful to them. I want them to like the food we sell and like coming into the store. Most of the spices that we have, you can’t find in Wal-Mart or FreshCo.”
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