“My name is Derick Cotnam. I’m the founder and owner of My Catering Group. A locally owned company first to ever serve all the big museums in the city all at once like the Canadian Museum of Nature here in Centretown, Canadian Museum of History, National Gallery of Canada and others in the downtown core.
I got started in this business after actually getting out of the business. I had worked starting at age 14 at a local pizzeria. From there, I went to work at a butchery where I did high school co-op, and I did half of the hours required to be an apprentice butcher. And I kind of fell into a sink-or-swim scenario where one of the senior sous chefs had left, and it was a small operation that was about to expand into a much larger operation as they were building a brand-new 10,000-square-foot facility, which was going to be a restaurant, convention center, wedding venue, you name it.
The owner told me, “I need you to fill this role for now as the sous chef,” and it was kind of sink or swim, not that I had the qualifications at all to be a proper sous chef at age 20.
But I worked as hard as I could, and the owner wanted to keep me in that position. I was in culinary school at the time, and I had just gone through the first year of chef training at Algonquin College. And I’d already been working in kitchens and similar operations like a butchery for a long time, so I already had a lot of the skills that were needed.
For the first job I ever did for myself, I met a client at my uncle’s store. I borrowed a Green Egg from the store, took it apart, strapped a big piece of it into the front seat of my ’92 Acura Vigor, and drove to the client’s house in Nepean. There, I put the barbecue back together and catered a really nice event.
I met some of their friends at the party, and within two months, things had started to snowball from there.
And then eventually, the income from the catering operation became enough to sustain my lifestyle, and I never looked back.
So when I started the catering operation, because of the overhead associated with the commercial kitchen, I really didn’t want to make that investment because I wouldn’t have been able to afford it. So for the longest time, I was actually cooking out of my mom’s kitchen before she would get home from work. One time she came home from work early, found me, four of my chef buddies, a full kitchen full of ingredients, camping burners on the dining room table, coolers with ice everywhere, and she lost her mind and told me that I absolutely need to rent a commercial kitchen.
So from there, I did what I called “kitchen hopping.” When I would get a job, I would approach different restaurateurs or people that run convention centers, so I had a lot of support from different people.
I used to rent St. Anthony’s Soccer Club—the kitchen there—they were extremely supportive. Shout out to Joe from St. Anthony’s.
When 2021 rolled around, we were approached with RFPs to reply to catering contracts for the National Gallery of Canada, Canadian Museum of History, and the Canadian Museum of War. We replied to all three RFPs, and we won all three of them. We opened up all of those properties, the cafe operations, within a six-week period. As you can imagine, going from a team of maybe eight to, call it, seventy overnight, it was a big undertaking, and there were some growing pains. Shortly after, we got the contract for the Canadian Museum of Nature here in Centretown as well.
So at one point, we were operating all four cafes and the lion’s share of all the catering going on in those facilities, as well as continuing to do tons of high-end wedding business. We deal with all of the predominant luxury wedding planners in the area. We do a great deal of business within the parliamentary and diplomatic community. We were selected to do the closing of Parliament Hill, Centre Block which definitely says something about the quality that we can put out there.
So currently this year, we have been growing produce from my own farm. We purchased all of our seedlings locally. We purchased 600 seedlings: 200 varieties of peppers, 200 varieties of tomatoes, and 200 varieties of squash, which we’re currently starting to harvest and incorporate into our offerings.
Whether it’s sliced jalapeños going onto a taco at an event or a honey maple sriracha sauce that we’re producing, bottling, and retailing through the cafes or using in our catering operation, this is the first small step to becoming more self-sustaining.
The vision for us is to eventually have a full-blown farming operation, automated greenhouse shipping containers, and a full team of farmers working up there growing produce that we can transform into products that we can use in our operations and also retail.
I think when you look at the type of corporations that were running the federal properties before, you would never see anything like this.
We do a ton of work in the community, with CHEO, the Boys and Girls Club, La Table des Chefs, which helps out the Ottawa Mission and the Shepherds of Good Hope, and many other not-for-profit organizations that are helping people fight food insecurity.
We have the autonomy to do this because we’re not trying to please a bunch of shareholders.
We’re farming our own stuff. We know where it’s coming from. We are doing it on a very small scale right now, but with the acreage that we have, which is just about 25 acres of land, there is a ton of land to make this vision of being more sustainable and growing local produce and shipping into the city and using it throughout our operation something that actually could very much be attainable in the future.
I’m working very hard with a lot of our colleagues to explore all the opportunities when it comes to agriculture grants and subsidies to bring this vision to life.
The way My Catering Group started was small at-home dinner parties, and then it started to morph into lots of weddings and then corporate events, and then we had an opportunity to work with the Pacific Alliance on Parliament Hill to put on an event for Peru, Chile, Mexico, and Colombia. Doing that event basically put us on the radar of the parliamentary and diplomatic community.
I’m so grateful to work with the people that I do, and none of this would be possible without them.”
Derick Cotnam
Founder and Owner of My Catering Group
@mycateringgroup
Photos and Interview by @_finn
