Lazy Daisy's Cafe / Lazy Daisy Foods

Dawn Chapman built Lazy Daisy's Cafe in 2011 on four pillars — local, farm-fresh, homemade, community — inherited from childhood summers on her family's Midhurst farm and a grandmother who taught her that feeding people is how you build a family. The Toronto cafe became beloved for all-day breakfasts and buttermilk biscuits; when the pandemic closed the dining room, customers kept asking for the biscuits at home. Chapman answered with Canada's first frozen, bake-at-home buttermilk biscuit, and accidentally founded a second company, Lazy Daisy Foods, now on grocery shelves alongside the cafe that inspired it. It's a pandemic pivot that became a product line: resilience expressed as CPG. One business nourishes the neighbourhood; the other carries it across the country. Few small businesses have turned a closure into a second company this gracefully.