On Monday, we shared the grassroots origin story of On The Move Organics and reflected on our earliest years. Today, we’re picking up the thread to look back at what came next. 

Between 2012 and 2014, our small team spent two years running the first iteration of The Root Cellar - a tiny, local organic juice bar, bakery, lunch counter, and community space in the Old East Village. One of those years was also dedicated to a DIY renovation of the unit next door, using salvaged materials, all while continuing to operate On The Move Organics’ home delivery program, market juice bar, and farmers' market green grocery. It was an exciting time … and no, we didn’t sleep much! 

We faced a business reality within the first year of running the little 19 seat cafe: using local and organic ingredients was expensive! Our unusually high cost of goods and our commitment to running a cafe that we (the workers) could also afford to eat at, did not allow us to use a conventional food service pricing model. In short, we either needed to increase the prices substantially, or take on more risk and workload to achieve much higher sales volume. We also saw benefit in introducing much higher-margin products into our offering, like beer. So we decided to double down, yet again, expand our space, and incubate a nano-brewery in the back.

In 2014, we said goodbye to Max, baker extraordinaire and one of the Cellar’s founders, who left to join his parents out west, and opened the doors to the newly expanded Root Cellar. It had evolved into a full-service, sit-down restaurant featuring local organic menus designed to showcase the best of the regional harvests brought in by On The Move. Our staff and community grew, and we approached restaurant management with the same community-focused, creative, and cooperative spirit that guided On The Move Organics.

Much like On The Move has always been more than a grocery delivery service, The Root Cellar always strived to be more than a restaurant - it was a new stage of our experiment in reconnecting people with the food they eat. We saw it as a space for our community to engage more directly with the food system: the food we served was sourced primarily through On The Move Organics’ network of local organic farmers and producers, supplemented by a co-op natural food distributor for items we couldn’t find locally. We mapped out exactly where ingredients came from on our Local Food Sourcing Map in the dining room. Our coffee was sourced from the CCDA campesino co-operative in Guatemala - a group that has long fought for social justice - and roasted locally by our longtime friend, Patrick (the director and co-founder of the CCDA visited us twice over the years, and Jeff visited them twice as well). Our serving team was happy to tell you the daily specials, but also details about how the greens in your salad were grown, or why we served local water buffalo instead of beef burgers. 

The Root Cellar was about sharing the story of local food, and inviting people to participate in that story. 

Beyond our commitment to sourcing local and organic food, we worked hard to provide meaningful, fair employment and to ensure our space was welcoming and accessible. We launched the Community Jar program early on, making sure there was always a coffee or soup available, regardless of anyone’s ability to pay. We offered space for local artists to exhibit and sell their work, partnering with over 100 artists from the London area over the years. We eventually completed another sustainable, salvaged-material renovation on the second floor and opened a special events space that hosted everything from our Farm to Fork Dinners, to live music, to poetry readings, to eco-focused weddings. Throughout all this, we remained committed to deepening our community and earth-first ethos.

Looking back, it’s hard to fully capture the extent of our sustainability efforts at The Root Cellar, even beyond our commitment to sourcing local and organic food. From obsessive food waste reduction and a robust composting program, to being the first business in London to purchase the volume of biodegradable takeout containers necessary to convince the distributor that London was worth making a regular route for, we pushed boundaries. We undertook three major renovations using primarily salvaged and repurposed materials, used eco-friendly cleaning products, ran a Cyclist Discount Program, and offset our energy use through Bullfrog Power. Did these decisions help our financial bottom line? No. But we stuck with increasing the social and ecological benefits, determined to prove that a regenerative, triple bottom line restaurant was possible.

In the years following The Root Cellar’s expansion, On The Move found its cadence for a time. We loved connecting with our customers and fellow vendors at weekend farmers’ markets, deepening our relationships with local farmers (many of whom became friends), and welcoming new coworkers onto the team, some of whom are still with us today. There was a real community developing around the local food movement in London, and we were excited to be part of it. 

In these years On The Move was really on the move - after outgrowing our packing space at the market, and then at the restaurant, we opened a packing facility and pop-up shop a few doors down from the Cellar on Dundas Street, and then outgrew that and moved into our current home on Burbrook Place. Through it all, we kept pushing the envelope on sustainable, DIY, creative, and regenerative approaches to our work. Some standout moments from those years: A solar-powered, custom-built cargo bike slash mobile juice bar (yes, really), planting an organic pawpaw orchard at the Reimer Family Farm in Aylmer (a project ten years in the making that's only just now bearing native Ontario fruit), supporting the HOPE Eco Farms community as they extended their growing season with hoop houses and new organic varietals, completing a home delivery via canoe when a street flooded in our neighbourhood(!),17 years of grocery delivery by North America's longest cargo bicycle (made from almost entirely salvaged materials), and countless local food and waste reintegration experiments: natural urban beekeeping, urban agriculture, the logistically challenging zero-waste packaging, new composting methods, so much fermentation, and more. 

People were interested in (and some frankly puzzled over) our work at both On The Move and The Root Cellar. Over the years, we won several environmental and business awards, and were featured in two documentaries on co-operative sustainable business. Beyond the accolades, our team felt we were having an impact. Fuelled by On The Move, and animated by our incredible staff, The Root Cellar had become a landmark gathering place for nourishing community. On The Move was increasing its local food purchasing, growing its sustainable farming network and working hard to incubate new local food projects. It was really feeling like a movement. 

Then, on May 30th 2019, everything changed. We lost Joel Pastorius - Jeff’s cousin, and one of our core team members who helped grow On The Move and The Root Cellar. If you were with us back then, you likely met Joel at the farmers’ market or delivering boxes by bike through London’s neighbourhoods. Here’s what we shared after his passing. We’re sharing it again now, as we reflect on the last six years without him:

Joel has been a core team member, co-owner and leader in our organization since the very early years, and more than that, he's part of our family. Joel was a proud co-owner of On the Move Organics and founding member of The Root Cellar and London Brewing. As a group, we wouldn’t be where we are today without Joel’s unfailing work ethic, quiet stubborn drive, and big-hearted spirit. Over the past eight years Joel filled every position: from bread baker to pizza chef, from bike deliverer to newsletter author, from bottle filler to pun-y beer namer. Joel was always there when he was needed, and he tirelessly supported his team.

Less than a year later, the pandemic hit, and our world turned upside down, again. The Root Cellar shut its doors (first due to lockdowns, and later, because reopening simply no longer made sense). Meanwhile, demand for On The Move’s home delivery service skyrocketed, growing by over 500% almost overnight.

Everything that could break, did. We scrambled to scale up - heavily investing in more bins, more vehicles, better software, and so much more - and leaned on the strength of our team. Many Root Cellar staff jumped in to help pack and deliver orders and communicate with customers. Long-time customers were patient with our growing pains. This time was a turning point for us in a lot of ways. Our remaining core team took new directions, with some of us focusing on On The Move, and some of us moving on to other projects. Nina joined our team at On The Move as the procurement coordinator. It was during this time that we partnered with LIFE*SPIN to launch the Community Food Box Project, ensuring families already facing barriers had access to healthy, fresh food. Above all, those early pandemic months, though stressful, made it clear just how essential a resilient local food system really is. We felt it deeply - both where our work up to that point had succeeded, and where work remained to be done.

As the immediate crisis subsided, demand for home delivery naturally began to slow, and we found ourselves needing to expand our offering through product experimentation and development to keep pace with rising costs. With support from our staff, Green Economy London, London Environmental Network, and many of you, On The Move kept reinventing. We expanded our line of prepared foods. Our love for natural beekeeping grew into LOLA Bees (a pollinator-focused environmental education non-profit). Our growing interest in healthy non-alcoholic beverages led to the development of Forest City Botanicals (plant-based functional health beverages). Our enduring obsession with waste reduction propelled us towards expanding our (already logisitically complex!) Zero Waste Club program. 

Not everything worked out. We tried launching a quick-service takeout kitchen focused on local and organic comfort food, but the support for truly local and organic food just didn’t exist in that location.

Still, we kept going, always lifted by our community. In 2023, LOLA Bees won an eco-grant award and was able to purchase a cargo e-bike and trailer system. We partnered with them on our home delivery program, seriously scaling up our pedal power. Our website that was held together by popsicle sticks and bandaids finally gave way, and Steve (our longtime digital & communications coordinator) led the development of a new website that streamlined ordering, substantially increased our same-day delivery and 2-hour pick-up options, and better supported our Zero Waste Club deposit system. This boost allowed us to increase our zero waste lineup to nearly 50% of our non-produce grocery offerings. (And just between you and us, while we are incredibly proud of the Zero Waste Club, which we’ve calculated at peak saves over 30,000 plastic packaging bags per year, outside of our loose packing of produce, which more than doubles that number - it is a logistically complex and expensive program to operate, yet has the perception of being more profitable then its plastic wrapped or canned counterparts … file this one under ‘projects we’ve committed to because we strongly believe in reducing and reintegrating waste’, not under ‘projects that are easy to run and financially lucrative’.)

So here we are today, seventeen years after Jeff first hung that air conditioner in the window of his spare bedroom. Through it all, we’ve stayed committed to community economic development, increasing ecological sustainability, and continuously incubating and developing new projects that challenge the many barriers a future resilient food system continues to face.

Thanks for being on this journey with us. More soon.