Two Manitoba icons come together
Lunchrooms around Manitoba will never be the same now that KUB bread is in the hands of Chip & Pepper Foster.
The high-energy Winnipeg-born twins who took the clothing market by storm in the late 1980s with their self-branded T-shirts, shorts and board shorts, have set their sky’s-the-limit sights on the bread business. “What kid wouldn’t want to eat a sandwich with tie-dyed bread?” asks Pepper.
Indeed, the Fosters are going to dip into what they’ve learned in their more than 30 years in the branding business. Also on the horizon? KUB bread bags in neon orange, neon yellow, neon green
as well as camouflage and, of course, tie-dyed. The Fosters bought the KUB brand, trademarks and recipes earlier this year but not KUB’s facility on Erin Street. Pepper is busy touring industrial sites around town looking to open a plant between 50,000 square feet to 80,000 square feet.
“I need to produce 50,000 to 100,000 loaves a week,” he says. Pepper approached a number of different manufacturers in town to see about producing KUB loaves with their excess capacity but he didn’t get any takers.
“They look at me like another shark in the ocean. Well, Chip and I are coming anyway,” he says.
Anybody who believes the Fosters are getting out of their comfort zone with KUB doesn’t know their family history. That bottle of Elman’s pickles or horseradish in your grocery cart? Those were made by their grandfather, Samuel Finkleman, and their dad, Manny, who was known as “The Pickle King.”
“We grew up in the food business,” Pepper says. “We used to go to the grocery stores around town with my dad in the Elman’s Foods truck. We’d back up to the back door and unload the pickles and pick up the returns. I grew up making horseradish,” Pepper says. Chip remembers accompanying his dad slinging pickles and other foods to grocery stores, markets and delis around town.
“We know the pressures of having daily deliveries. It doesn’t stop. But growing up in the food business gives us confidence,” Chip says. This isn’t the Fosters’ first foray into baking, either. Pepper and his wife, Vanessa, bought the high-end Pennyloaf Bakery on Corydon Avenue last year.
One thing the twins have learned over more than three decades in business is that great brands never die and some stables, like bread, have eternal life. “We know how to make brands come alive and scale them up. Our experience has taught us what to do and what not to do. We’re not wet behind the ears. We understand you’ve got to be resilient,” Chip says. While KUB had been largely focused in Winnipeg for its nearly 100-year run, the Fosters will be looking further afield—much further afield.
The plan is to get off the ground in Manitoba first and then expand to Ontario and Saskatchewan and into the U.S. in North Dakota, Minnesota and even Los Angeles, where Chip lives and where Pepper did, too, until last year.
They’re not going to stop with the bread, either. Plans are in the works to open several KUB delis around Winnipeg.
“We’re going to offer three sandwiches, a hot pastrami, hot corn beef and egg with tuna, that’s it,” Pepper says. “The bread will be KUB, the pickles will be from Elman’s, the meat will come from Smith’s and the cheese will come from Bothwell’s. We’ll be all-Canadian,” he says.
Chip still can’t believe other local bread companies didn’t jump at the chance to buy KUB.
“It’s really exciting,” he says. “I think we’re going to have desserts and danishes, stuff that’s easy to grab and doesn’t perish quickly.” Pepper is optimistic a KUB beer could be on liquor shelves in the not-too-distant future, too.
He’s currently looking at a couple of different players in Winnipeg’s thriving microbrewery market to produce it.
“KUB beer will satisfy the taste buds of those who like lagers, like me. It’ll be for everyone, from the docks of Lake of the Woods to the beaches of California,” he says.