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Heritage

Knob Hill Farms

Closed 2000–2001

Grocery chain · Toronto, Markham, Pickering, Mississauga, Oshawa, Weston, Cambridge · Greater Toronto Area

Steve Stavro's produce stand at 1598 Queen Street East — across the road from his father's butcher shop — grew into the grocery chain that taught Canada to shop big. His first proper store opened on the Danforth in 1954; in 1963 he built a 60,000-square-foot 'food terminal' in Markham, pioneering the warehouse-format supermarket decades before Costco crossed the border; and the 1991 Cambridge terminal, at 340,000 square feet, was billed as the largest food store in the world. At its height the chain ran ten terminals with some 800 employees and prices twenty to thirty per cent under the majors.

When Knob Hill closed in 2000–01, Stavro paid every debt and every employee in full — and the chain's rolling plastic shopping carts still turn up in Toronto basements as laundry baskets, small monuments to a boy from Gabresh who fed a city.

Details

Founded
1951
People
Steve Stavro (born Gabresh/Gavros, Kostur region, Aegean Macedonia, 1926)

Sources (4)

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knob_Hill_Farms
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Stavro
  3. https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2021/04/history-knob-hill-farms-toronto/
  4. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/steve-stavro-former-owner-of-maple-leafs-and-knob-hill-farms-dies-at-78-1.599953

  • Julie's

    Fine dining · Toronto

    The fine-dining room in John Bitove Sr.'s first portfolio — the polished end of a spectrum that ran from coffee counters to nightclubs, and the apprenticeship f...

    Macedonian connection: Bitove Sr.'s fine-dining house, part of the family's first restaurant portfolio.

    Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bitove_Sr.

  • Knob Hill Stable

    Thoroughbred racing stable · Ontario

    Closed wound down after 2006

    Steve Stavro's other passion ran on four legs. Knob Hill Stable, founded in 1967, campaigned more than eighty thoroughbreds, took a Sovereign Award with Benburb...

    Macedonian connection: Steve Stavro's racing stable — more than eighty thoroughbreds at its peak.

    Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Stavro

  • Leisure World — the Macedonian Wing

    Long-term care · Toronto

    Closed 2014

    From 2001 to 2014 a Toronto Leisure World facility kept a dedicated Macedonian wing — care in the community's own language a generation before such things becam...

    Macedonian connection: A dedicated Macedonian wing within a Toronto nursing facility, recorded in Canadian Macedonian Place's newsletter.

    Sources: https://canadianmacedonianplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/13886-CMP-Zdravets-Newsletter-SinglePage-FINAL.pdf

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