Inside the making of a booming Jamaican patty brand
It was the spring of 2019 when Opal Rowe came home from work feeling tired and hungry. She was craving an iconic snack from her childhood in Jamaica—a Jamaican patty. “But, I didn’t know where to get a patty that was more like a meal than junk fast food,” Rowe explains. “There were no ‘good choice’ patties, in terms of healthier ingredients.” The situation prompted Rowe to develop her own better-for-you Jamaican patty recipe.
At the time, Rowe owned a home care business that provided services to elderly clients in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), where she lived, but she’d always had an interest in food and a love for cooking. She knew she wanted her patty filling to be hearty, like what you’d find in a meat pie. When it came to the pastry, Rowe opted to create a vegan version, instead of the traditional pastry recipe that uses beef suet. “I had friends who were vegan and could no longer enjoy patties,” she says, thinking a vegan pastry could be more universally enjoyed.
Recipe development took time. “Patties for Jamaicans are like croissants for the French,” Rowe says. “We buy them, but don’t know how to make them.” Around the end of 2019, Rowe had nailed down a vegan pastry recipe along with a few filling varieties made with both meat and plant-based ingredients.
Around the same time, she was looking to exit her home care business, due to burnout, and found a buyer. Now, Rowe had time to turn her patty recipe into a full-fledged business. She envisioned opening a series of “patty bars” under the name Stush Patties. “Stush is a Jamaican word that means ‘proper,’ and it’s the equivalent of ‘bougie’ or ‘posh,’” Rowe explains. “I was trying to make something healthier that people could have for dinner or with a glass of wine. So, it was a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that we’re making proper patties.”
Once COVID hit, Rowe needed to pivot from her original business idea and decided to sell direct to customers instead, delivering her products to people’s homes. “I just started promoting the patties on Facebook Marketplace,” Rowe explains. At its peak, she would make up to 500 patties a week by hand and deliver them across the GTA. “People were so happy to see you,” she recalls of the home deliveries. But, she recognized her business model wasn’t scalable. So, at the end of 2020, she took a six-month break to strategize.
Rowe’s new goal was to enter the retail market. That meant a swap from fresh to frozen, designing packaging, reducing her lineup to four flavours: two vegan (Soy Chik’n; Lentil & Veggie) and two with meat (Chicken; Beef) and moving from a shared kitchen to a commercial bakery. By the summer of 2021, Stush Patties officially relaunched as a boxed, frozen product. And thanks to the traction she’d gained from social media, she already had a few independent grocers on board, including McEwan Fine Foods. By the end of 2021, about 20 independent grocers in Toronto were selling Stush Patties.
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Then, in 2022, as part of her participation in York University’s YSpace accelerator program, Rowe exhibited Stush Patties at the CHFA NOW trade show in Toronto. One of the first people who visited her booth was a buyer for Whole Foods Market. “They were very interested,” Rowe recalls. Getting into Whole Foods was a long process that involved moving production facilities again and redoing her barcodes. She was finally approved by the grocer in December 2022 and began selling at its seven Ontario locations by September 2023. “When I saw my products in Whole Foods, knowing that it was the first time a Whole Foods in Canada was carrying Jamaican beef patties ... it was magical,” she says.
After Whole Foods, Rowe set her sights on selling patties outside of Ontario—a trickier endeavour since she was selling products with meat. It meant finding a federally approved co-packer, which wasn’t an easy task. “There was a point when the challenge seemed insurmountable,” she says. But Rowe persisted and after a year she found a co-packer and a national distributor shortly afterwards. That led Rowe to her first major out-ofprovince launches: at 20 IGA stores in British Columbia in September 2024 and five locations of the Montreal organic grocer Marchés TAU a few months later.
Today, Stush Patties are sold in more than 150 stores. Despite the tariff uncertainty, Rowe is still eager to enter the U.S. market in the next year. “We started off in a challenge with COVID, so I’ve learned to realize that if I’m growing, there are going to be challenges,” she says. “If I don’t have challenges, then I have to start wondering what is wrong. When challenges come my way, I embrace them.”
This article was first published in Canadian Grocer’s May 2025 issue.
