After 25 years
in business in
Vaughan and
millions of dollars in sales, we
look back on the
career of Susan
Niczowski and
one of the largest
fresh-prepared
food makers
in Canada.
SUSAN
NICZOWSKI
PRESIDENT
OF
SUMMEr
FRESH
It’s easy to trace the path that led Susan Niczowski to her elevated position in the food manufacturing industry. Now the President of the salad-and-spread giant Summer Fresh, food was
– as you might expect – central during her childhood. By age four, she was already barbequing
vegetables from her father’s garden and making homemade ice cream in her family’s kitchen – a
process she modestly refers to as “tinkering.”
Her grandfather owned a restaurant where her uncles worked. There, she quickly learned about
the costs of business, the quality of ingredients, and the importance of self-reliance. She learned
why the owner should always know how to cook the restaurant’s food “because otherwise if the
chef leaves, you’re screwed.”
Later, while she was in university she started as a microbiologist at Shopsy’s Foods working with
processed deli meats, potato and pasta salads. “It was great, I learned a lot and I was always
able to work with great people but I always felt like I was in a box,” she says of her six years
working there. So, in 1991, she and her mother pulled together about 17 recipes and began what
would become Summer Fresh.
“I would knock on doors from nine to two and then I would come back and work on the
recipes,” she explained. At first, “back” referred to her home in Downsview, but with some
help from her mom, who co-signed the lease, Niczowski acquired a 3,000 square foot unit on
Rowntree Dairy Road in the newly incorporated city of Vaughan. That’s when the business
really took off.
Summer Fresh’s head office is still on Rowntree Dairy Road. Like many other buildings on
the industrial back road, the outside is nondescript, but inside the lobby looks exactly how
you’d expect the lobby of a $100-million company to look. It’s cool and spacious with wooden
accents on white walls and glass. Around the back of the staircase leading up to the exposed
second floor, there are four three-foot metal molds of the vegetables found in the most popular
products: an eggplant, a tomato, a n artichoke and a pepper. Each of them was custom made
by a local artist.
At Summer Fresh, “fashion” is not only a central part of their brand but also a part of their corporate ethos. “Like fashion, food follows seasonal trends,” the website reads. “While the staples
like meat and potatoes stay the same, the foods that you use to accessorize the dish change
with the season.” In a practical sense what this means is that Niczowski and her employees are
constantly re-inventing themselves, releasing as many as 80 new recipes a season often whittled
down from a list of hundreds. She even trademarked the phrase “Food is Fashion.”
2016 \ Celebrate Vaughan
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