The Cancilla Fruit Market is a wholesale operation that opens its downtown back-alley doors to a limited number of walk-in customers every morning.
Customers are welcome to navigate the boxes and old Toledo scale to pick out bananas, tomatoes or onions in the main area, or walk into the refrigerated section for berries, lettuce among a selection of produce.
A regular store it is not.
In fact, the sign on the door will tell you it started back in 1908. And Anthony Cancilla is the fourth generation to run the business, which speaks to the enduring history of a family in Barrie and the business his great-grandparents started about 114 years ago.
Cancilla joined the family operation as a child, working for his dad (Frank) and uncle (Sam).
“I worked in the store on Clapperton Street (No. 23), I worked in the (former) opera house (23 Collier St.) and we operated there and now I’m in the warehouse here,” he tells BarrieToday. “I’ve been working here since 1978. I took it over in 1999. My father died in 1999.”
The warehouse, which is accessed from a well-marked alley off Collier Street and a stone’s throw from Mulcaster Street, has occupied the same space since it was built in the early 1960s, but there have been a number of different store front locations over the years.
The Cancillas owned much of the property off Mulcaster, around the Five Points, early on. But Cancilla’s uncle, Sam, who was active in the community, once said the property became too valuable to use to sell bananas.
During that time, the commercial grocery store business evolved, becoming increasingly sophisticated. So in recent years, the Cancilla business focused more on the wholesale side, supplying restaurants.
It all started when Anthony's great-grandparents, Domenic and Francesca (Saso) Cancilla, launched the business at 40 Elizabeth St., which is now Dunlop Street West, at the corner of Maple Avenue, in 1907 or 1908.
The Saso and Cancilla families both came from Sicily and settled in Barrie, Donna Douglas wrote in her weekly column for the now-defunct Barrie Examiner a decade ago.
Barrie was a six-block town, for the most part, with around 6,200 residents.
They delivered their fruits and vegetables by horse and buggy, as well as by a hand-push cart.
Their son, Anthony, married Mary Battalia, also of Sicilian heritage, and they joined their parents in the produce trade, running Cancillas Fruit and Vegetables for the first half of the past century until about 1950 when their sons, Frank and Sam, father and uncle of the current owner, took over.
During that time, the business skipped around the Five Points, but always remained downtown. Moving from behind the former Wellington Hotel to a currently empty lot right at the Five Points, up to Clapperton Street and then the old opera house location on Collier Street, which is when they built the warehouse off the alley in the back.
Three years ago, the warehouse property was sold and there are plans to develop a condominium complex.
A 27-storey mixed-use building containing 214 residential units and 1,100 square metres of ground-floor commercial space three levels of parking are proposed for 21 and 23 Collier St., which includes a house and a lot used as Taco Alley last summer.
“I guess at some point there won’t be vegetables available at this location,” Cancilla says.
For now, Cancilla continues to work the family business in the same old spot. The pandemic has taken its toll, but the businesses continues to support the four people who work there. And he welcomes the public Monday to Saturday 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. and takes phone orders.
He points out that downtown still has no grocery stores, but he’s not convinced that’s not a game for an individual “little buyer that sells stuff.”
