Back Forty Foods taking safety measures, seeing more efficient shoppers

By Justin Seward

Commentator/Courier

Like many other businesses, Foremost’s Back Forty Foods grocery store has had to make adjustments amid the current world health crisis

“(On) our stock days, just because I don’t want to have a whole bunch of high school kids in here working normal shifts with the public, we sent them home for a reason,” said Colin Hollywood, store owner along with wife Leslie.

“So to try and mitigate the contact that all the high school kids have with the general public on our stalk days, which is Mondays and Thursdays, we’re just closing in the morning. (We are) letting the kids come in put all the stock away for three hours and then go home.”

Hollywood said they run a pretty clean store to begin with and there has been a change with wiping down door handles, freezer handles and the carts hourly.

“We’re pretty fortunate to have some pretty clean staff here to begin with, so that aspect of it hasn’t really changed much for us,” he said.

“The only thing like I said is bleaching and disinfecting everything once or twice during the day, we’re doing it every hour now.”

The store is short on the ingredients to make food such as yeast, flour, salt and sugar.

Additionally, the store has backed off making the prepared foods in the mean time.

“Usually we’ll do one or two dishes every night and have been for a long time,” he said.

“Just ready-to-go meals cooked in store. We kind of backed out of those when this all a started just because we didn’t know if people would even want them. We’ll start doing them again here right away. People are kind of wanting sandwiches and salads and meals ready to go again.”

Hollywood has noticed the buying trend of people, which he thinks have reverted back to 15 plus years ago.

“People are coming out and doing one big grocery shop a week or maybe one every two weeks as opposed to coming everyday for four or five items,” he said.

He says the first week of that method was “really rough” because a big rush of customers right away, but his suppliers have done a really good job keeping up to their demands.

“There (are) certain things that we can not get right now,” he explained.

“As it travels down the supply chain, is when you start to see back ups. We got hit right off the bat. Everybody needed flour, cleaning supplies, toilet paper and yeast.”

The store feels that with being in an isolated community that they did not see the mad panic compared to the big cities.

“Our customers have been fantastic in that regard,” he said.

“Nobody is trying to come in and hoard stuff. Nobody is coming in and walking down the canned food aisle and taking everything.”

Deliveries are available by phoning in to Back Forty Foods at (403) 867-3586 and placing your order and payment can be either through credit card over the phone or leaving a cheque at the door.

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