Beating the holiday food rush

By Ryan Percy

With less than a month until Christmas, do you have your holiday food prepared?

While holidays are always a busy time for getting food from vendors, Christmas is one of the worst when it comes to wait times.

The Cheese Bar in Emeryville, Ont., has a number of options available for customers. The regular order for the holiday season costs around $60 to $80 per platter for an assortment of cheeses and charcuterie. This year Sarah Barrette, the Cheese Bar’s owner, is planning to have 300 platters made for the week leading into Christmas. This is up 50 per cent from 2017, which was a 100 per cent increase over 2016. This means the Cheese Bar is making between $18,000 and $24,000 just from Christmas week orders.

If you are planning to order certain cheeses, Barrette recommends placing orders early. Then you are both guaranteed a cheese platter and can get what you want on it.

“Fresh goat cheese is not available in winter because the fat content [of the milk] becomes too high and they are not able to produce cheese with it,” Barrette said. “Price doesn’t go up, the cheese just isn’t available.”

If you are ordering for another holiday, like Easter or Thanksgiving, Barrette said placing your order a week in advance is generally enough time. But for Christmas she said all order slots fill up by mid November.

Ted Farron is the owner of Ted Farron’s Gourmet Butcher. At 78, he has run the business in South Windsor for the last 33 years.

Farron said they get incredibly busy during Christmas. He said, however, Christmas’s proximity to Thanksgiving affects their sale of certain items and now people are turning to newer things.

“I think that with Thanksgiving and Christmas so close together people get tired of turkey,” Farron said. “In leaner times a turkey was a good value to feed a big group of people. Nowadays my customers are buying less traditional items such as black Angus prime rib roasts and beef tenderloin.”

Farron guarantees any order coming in will be fulfilled and said the store does not generally run out of product except in extreme scenarios. He said some of the more popular items this year are black Angus prime rib roasts, turkey breasts and beef tenderloins.

Whether you plan to order a turducken or a platter of various cheeses, it is best to get your order in as soon as possible. Put your mind at ease about keeping your stomach full.