The Trade War Killed My Company’s American Expansion

In 2016, my wife, Vasiliki, and I started Canada’s first vegan fast-food chain, Odd Burger, in my hometown of London, Ontario. Within a few years, we had opened more restaurants throughout Ontario, and sold franchises in Ontario, B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan. In 2023, we launched a line of packaged goods, including chickpea burgers and vegan breakfast sausages, which we sold in grocery stores. We went public in 2021, and since then our sales have grown by 165 per cent. Today we have 17 restaurants and three food trucks nationwide. Last fiscal year we did over $5 million in overall sales.

But in spite of all this domestic success, we’ve had our sights set on the U.S. market for a long time—we knew that if we could tackle America, we could be ten times bigger. Our first foray into the U.S. was in 2022, when we considered opening a location in New York City—but real estate there was just too competitive to be our first inroad. Instead, we set up an American corporation and signed agreements with franchise developers in Washington State, who agreed to open 20 restaurants over eight years, and one in Florida to open 40 in the same timeframe. 

It wasn’t easy; setting up a franchise in the U.S. is a lot more complicated than in Canada, because of how much things like legal reviews can differ from state to state. We were confident that the effort and cost would all be worth it, though. We even started redesigning our marketing materials for the U.S. market, removing French from the packaging. 

We hoped to open our first U.S. Odd Burger in 2025. That was to be followed by a manufacturing facility in the U.S., to supply our American restaurants. We got a private American financier on board who was interested in investing $2 million in that effort. We hoped to eventually start selling packaged goods in American grocery stores, too. Our short-term plan was to ship products from our Canadian manufacturing facility, located in London, down to the U.S., while the American facility got built. 

When Trump started talking seriously about putting tariffs on Canadian products, I was worried but not deterred. I figured that it might affect us temporarily, while we were still importing from Canada, but we could handle it for a little while. Costs would come down once our U.S. facility was built, and we started the process of sourcing ingredients from American farmers.

Then came Trump’s rhetoric against Canada: that we’re not a real country, and we should become the 51st state. The idea of investing in the U.S. began to feel extremely uncomfortable. In March, we heard about Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian actress and entrepreneur who was detained by ICE for 12 days when she crossed the Mexican border to apply for a work visa. That was a real turning point for us. I didn’t feel safe travelling to the U.S. anymore, and I couldn’t in good conscience risk sending my staff down there.

Later that month, our U.S. financier backed out. He didn’t explicitly say it was because of tariffs, but I think a lot of Americans were pausing international investments. They didn’t know what was going to happen, and neither did we. 

My wife and I had a lot of sleepless nights, and long meetings with my sister Katie, who is Odd Burger’s director of operations. We thought long and hard about what our next move ought to be, but as we did it became more and more clear that the expansion just wasn’t tenable, not right now. 

In March, we halted the expansion. It was a combination of factors: our investor backing out, the safety of our staff travelling and the ethical quandary of expanding in the U.S. at a time when the country is waging an economic war against us. There was also the difficulty of pricing in the expansion, given the uncertainty of tariffs on our Canadian supply chain. It wasn’t an easy choice: we invested more than six figures into the U.S. expansion, including legal fees, contracts with franchise developers, franchise and state registrations and trademark applications. We’re lucky we didn’t spend even more on leases for our restaurants or the manufacturing facility. If we had, it would have been a lot harder and a lot more expensive to back out. 

Surprisingly, I don’t really feel too sad or disappointed. This was the right thing to do. We owe our existence to our Canadian customers, and we’ve decided that for now, our expansion plans will unfold here at home, where there’s still huge potential. 

We’re now refocusing on growing our business in Canada, especially our packaged goods line, which is already available in stores across the country. We were already selling in Whole Foods Market stores in Ontario, where we launched in June of 2024. We’re also in 22 Calgary Co-op stores and around 100 independent grocery stores across the country. And soon after we decided to refocus on Canada, 7-Eleven submitted an order to bring four of our products into more than 500 7-Eleven locations across Canada. We’ve been selling in them since May, and this has the potential to be a multi-million-dollar annual revenue generator. 

As it is, I’m feeling good today about our financial future. Thanks to the patriotism Canadians are showing, we’re seeing tremendous demand for our products in stores and restaurants. We hope we can resume our expansion one day—but probably not during the next four years. Trust in the current administration has been fundamentally broken, and it will take a long time to repair it.