How to start a tiffin service in Canada

Most tiffin businesses in Canada start the same way. You cook for your own family, a neighbour asks if you can make an extra box, and eight months later you are feeding forty people and losing track of who paid. The cooking was never the hard part. The hard part is everything around it.

This guide covers what actually has to be true before you can take money for meals in Canada, and the operational decisions that determine whether the business is worth running once it grows.

1. Decide where you are legally allowed to cook

This is the decision everything else hangs off, and the one most new kitchens get wrong. In every Canadian province, cooking food for sale to the public is regulated by your regional health authority — not by the CRA, and not by your municipality alone.

Broadly, you have three options:

• A commercial kitchen you rent by the hour. Commissary and shared kitchens exist in most metros and are the fastest legitimate route. You get an inspected space and a paper trail, without a lease.
• Your home kitchen, where permitted. Some health authorities allow home-based food businesses under specific conditions; others prohibit selling anything but low-risk shelf-stable foods from home. Hot, ready-to-eat curries are rarely low risk. Do not assume — call your regional health authority and ask about your specific menu.
• Your own commercial premises. Highest cost, and rarely the right first move.

Nearly everywhere you will also need food-handler certification for whoever cooks. It is a one-day course, it is inexpensive, and inspectors ask for it.

2. Register the business and understand your tax position

Register the business federally or provincially, open a separate business bank account on day one, and understand when you must start charging tax. The short version: once your taxable revenue crosses $30,000 over four consecutive calendar quarters, you stop being a small supplier and must register for GST/HST.

The part that surprises people is that prepared meals are generally taxable even though basic groceries are not. We wrote that up separately in GST/HST for tiffin and meal-prep businesses, because it deserves more than a paragraph.

3. Design a menu you can cook a hundred times

A restaurant menu offers choice. A tiffin menu removes it. That difference is the whole economics of the business: you are cooking a small number of dishes in volume, on a rotation, which is what lets you charge less than a restaurant and still make a margin.

Practical constraints worth designing around from the start:

• A fixed weekly rotation. Same dish on the same weekday means predictable shopping, predictable prep, and customers who know what is coming.
• Dishes that survive an hour in a container. Anything that goes soggy, separates or continues cooking in its own heat will arrive worse than it left.
• A veg and a non-veg track, and not much more. Every additional track multiplies your prep, your packing and your mistakes.
• Portion sizes you have actually weighed. Guessing is how food cost quietly climbs from 30% to 45%.

4. Price it before you sell it

Set the price from your costs, not from what the kitchen down the road charges. Underpricing is the most common way tiffin businesses fail, and it is very hard to correct once customers are anchored — the full method is in how to price a tiffin service.

The one number to internalise now: food cost should land near 30% of revenue. If your ingredients cost $4.50 a meal, you are looking at roughly $15 a meal to run a healthy business once labour, packaging, fuel and everything else is paid.

5. Draw delivery zones you can actually serve

New kitchens say yes to every address, then discover that one customer forty minutes away costs more in fuel and time than the subscription is worth. Draw zones by postal-code prefix and serve them on fixed days.

• Start with the two or three postal prefixes nearest your kitchen.
• Price outer zones higher, or do not serve them at all.
• Group each zone into one run so a driver is not crossing the city twice.
• Only add a zone when it has enough customers to justify the drive.

Density beats reach. Twenty customers in one neighbourhood is a better business than forty scattered across a metro.

6. Get the first fifty customers

Tiffin is a word-of-mouth business, and the channels that work are unglamorous:

1. 1Community WhatsApp and Facebook groups for your neighbourhood and your language community. This is where nearly every kitchen finds its first twenty.
2. 2A free trial box to a handful of people who will actually tell others. Feed the connectors.
3. 3Temples, gurdwaras, mosques and community centres, where a notice board still outperforms an ad.
4. 4International students, who are the most reliable tiffin demographic in Canada — they cook least, they subscribe longest, and they talk to each other constantly.
5. 5A page they can order from. Not a form. Somewhere they can see this week's menu, pick a plan, and pay.

7. Stop running it out of your head

The failure mode of a growing tiffin kitchen is administrative, not culinary. At twenty customers you can hold it all in your head. At sixty you cannot, and the symptoms are specific: the cook count is wrong because three pauses came in by text overnight, the new driver needs addresses read to him, and month-end is an hour of matching e-transfer emails to names you do not recognise.

Whatever you use — spreadsheets, a notebook, or software — you need four things to be true:

• One count that is right. Skips and pauses have to be reflected in tonight's cook sheet automatically, or the count is fiction.
• Routes that do not live in your head. A driver should be able to start without you.
• Payments matched to subscriptions. Not a bank statement you reconcile by memory.
• Numbers you can see. Food-cost percentage, who is due to renew, who quietly stopped ordering.

This is exactly what Tiffinware does — subscriptions, a daily cook sheet, self-building routes, a driver app, Interac and card collection, and sixteen reports including profit and loss. It is $99 a month flat with a 14-day free trial and no commission on your orders, and you can open the live demo without signing up for anything.

What to do this week

1. 1Call your regional health authority and ask what your menu requires.
2. 2Book a food-handler certification course.
3. 3Cost one week of your intended menu, per meal, to the cent.
4. 4Pick two postal prefixes and commit to serving only those.
5. 5Post in three community groups and offer five trial boxes.

The kitchens that last are not the ones with the best recipes. They are the ones that knew their food-cost percentage in month two.