Asian dessert emporium offers ‘the taste of home’
With hundreds of outlets in Taiwan and China, Meet Fresh is known for tasty, homemade treats
The GTA is developing one heck of a sweet tooth, and it’s being stoked by a wide range of dessert options out of Asia.
Now, the cosy flavours of Taiwan are here via Meet Fresh, a new dessert emporium that opened in January on Yonge St. just north of North York Centre.
“It’s the taste of home,” says Jason Sun, 31, executive partner of the master franchise ownership group for Eastern Canada. “It’s comfort food dessert.”
Many of Meet Fresh’s dishes can be served hot as well as cold, and go down nicely on a chilly Canadian night.
The top seller here is the Meet Fresh Signature ($8.70), which combines herbal jelly, herbal blended ice and taro balls. Also on order is Tofu Pudding ($6.99 or $7.20), a traditional Taiwanese dessert served with barley and other accompaniments such as mung beans or sweet potato. Dramatic-looking Shaved Iced, meanwhile, gets topped with condensed milk and choices such as taro ($10.70) and the outlet also serves drinks such as Winter Melon Tea ($5.40).
The brand dates back to 2007, when the two eldest siblings of the Fu family — they are always called Mr. and Mrs. Fu or Brother and Sister Fu and no one seems to even know their first names — opened a shop in Taiwan serving traditional desserts. Their younger brother, Fu Hsin-Chin, encouraged the venture and ran the business side.
The cooking duo focused on fresh ingredients and homemade processes. For instance, their herbal jelly starts with boiling juice for 24 hours. Then, the process of making the jelly itself takes a further eight hours. It’s doubly worth it: for the flavour and the fact that it does not include gelatin, so it’s totally vegetarian.
The youngest Fu spearheaded an expansion around Taiwan, and then into China. Now, there are about 500 outlets in that country alone, and more than 600 in total. No precise tally is available. “We can’t keep track,” says Sun.
The company uses a mixture of franchises and corporate stores. Fu the younger moved to California, and runs most of the U.S. stores as corporate outlets. The elder siblings, meanwhile, remain in Taiwan and are still involved in the business there.
Sun heard about the company via friends in China who were running successful franchises.
He already had a solid track record in business, working in phone accessories.
In 2009, he’d help found Fourfold Capital. Always looking for projects — and with a sweet tooth — he hoped to get into bringing an Asian dessert outlet to Toronto.
But he was wary of some of the offerings, particularly ice creamrelated ventures.
“This was the only concept that fits into our weather,” he says. He brought on some additional partners and landed the master franchise for eastern Canada.
(There are already two Meet Fresh outlets in Vancouver under a different franchise agreement. Meanwhile, Sun found an entrepreneur with franchise experience in Quebec and licensed him to open up locations there.)
Sun and his team got this location last fall and renovated it to the Meet Fresh look: a crisp and clean takeout counter and open kitchen, but with some cosy, traditional features such as bamboo wall panelling and red paper lanterns.
Most importantly, this spot has a full kitchen in the basement. Staff from head office in Taiwan came over for two months to train staff in making most of the menu items from scratch, including that laborious jelly We serve nothing here that’s canned,” Sun says.
What’s not made on site is brought in from the Taiwan production facility. That includes the taro balls. To get them in Canada, Sun and his team have to put in an order three months in advance to have them made and shipped.
You can get Taiwanese dessert elsewhere, but Meet Fresh’s reputation for delicious, homemade treats has led to lineups since opening. Even on freezing cold nights, devotees will stand outside to await their dessert.
So Sun has plans for more outlets around the GTA to start. He’ll focus on communities with large Asian populations first, but expects to open in more “mainstream” areas soon enough.
“We believe this can grow very fast,” he says.