Zing
Zing works in collaboration with diverse Canadian chefs and food creators to bottle their secret sauces for home cooks. Their sauces and seasonings are designed to be “pantry shortcuts” — home cooks can add Zing to ANY protein, vegetable or starch to create meals with globally inspired, restaurant quality flavour in minutes, minus the effort. Zing currently has a portfolio of nine distinct products representing creators, cuisines and cultures from around the world (e.g. an Indo-Chinese Chili Crisp inspired by Toronto’s Hakka diaspora, a garam masala with Persian influences etc.) that are made with premium, “real” ingredients and are sourced from Canadian suppliers wherever possible.
How will you use the $10,000 CAD for your business?
Zing has a new, exciting product release on the horizon, slated for summer of 2024 with two well known Toronto food personalities. We will use a portion of this funding to support our public Test Kitchen innovation process that involves community testing product prototypes. To elaborate: a part of our unique value proposition and one of our values as a company is to build “in community” — this means all our unreleased product formulations go through rigorous public testing with input from REAL consumers and tastemakers; we iterate until we have a “community approved” product recipe that we ultimately release to virtual and IRL shelves. It's a lot of fun, and it helps us minimize the bias in our work, while de-risking products before they release.
Remaining funds will be used to support Zing’s goal of becoming B Corporation certified, including anticipated certification and consulting fees.
What is your big goal for the future of the business?
Over the next five years, our goal is to be available in every major Canadian city, and have a presence in every province and territory. We are also working towards expanding our presence internationally, in the USA to start, where we already have a growing grassroots community of independent retailers stocking and championing our products. Today, we manufacture, warehouse, and ship entirely out of Toronto; we hope that in three to fiveyears we would be able to set up a presence in the USA to capture margin efficiencies and lower our cost of acquiring new customers in the region.
