After nearly 100 years KUB Bread has come to a close.
The local baker is the next business to fail due to COVID-19 struggles. Like a lot of businesses, it struggled with loss of customers and difficulty hiring employees after and a much more cutthroat grocery market. As a supplier to sporting event centers like Canada Life Centre and IG Field, the sports lockdowns were an instant loss of business. The restaurants and socials that used to buy bags and bags of KUB bread evaporated during closures and restrictions.
The end of COVID-19 restrictions have not restored business as inflation, the difficulty in finding workers and the various customers who went out of business was too hard for a family owned company to struggle through. Add to that the rising cost with lower demand, they made the only decision they could.
The location at 850 Erin had a simple note explaining the closure and social media was ahead of almost everyone in spreading the word. All the stock was bought out a day early.
The Einfeld family, who co-owns the bakery, said they were open to selling the KUB name but the bakery itself founded in 1923 would not see its 100th birthday. Thirty employees are affected by the closure and the owner himself will retire. The name KUB came from one of the four original partners. His name was Kucher and thus Kucher’s Ukrainian Bread was shortened to KUB.
The oldest rye bakery shop in the city closing is quite sad. It will be interesting to see if someone will leap into the business before the bread cools.
This has been a guest editorial by John Dobbin.
To read more from John, visit his blog Observations, Reservations, Conversations
