Brightside Foods is a frozen food brand based in Vancouver, founded by the folks who brought you Bandidas Taqueria. They make vegetarian and vegan meals that are quick, convenient, and incredibly tasty! Their collection includes Bandidas classics like the Habanero Hot Sauce and Cornbread, as well as some original creations like the ever-popular PintoPocket and two new burritos. “Brightside Foods, a selection of handy and delicious meals to keep in your freezer. Hearty, easy, and handmade from fresh and whole ingredients, it’s damn good food to fuel your busy, adventure-filled life.”
More recently, the business pivoted and now uses the Bandidas kitchen to make Brightside products. Working with partners like SPUD.ca has helped them design packaging and nutritional labels for their products.
Question: How are you supporting other local businesses?
Answer: We support local whenever we possible can – 100% of our suppliers are BC-based businesses. A lot of our ingredients come from the Bandidas kitchen, so we get them from local distributors like Yen Bros and Jim Koo Produce. The prepared products are all BC-made – our delicious tortillas are also locally made by Santa Rosa Company, vegan cheese from Daiya, dairy cheese from Antek Enterprises, and tofu from Sunrise Soya Foods. We work with Summit Labels for our product labeling and have partnered with Bon Chaz – to co-pack (support with packaging) our cornbread products for grocery stores.
Our bookkeeper is based out of our neighbourhood, we bank with Vancity, our waste management is with Revolution, our insurance is with Reliance, and our deliveries are done with MODO vehicles. We also hired local contractors to have our walk-in freezer built.
Question: What social and environmental practices are you proud of?
We have three employees who do production independently of the Bandidas staff, and then we share one employee with Bandidas. We pay above minimum wage and provide benefits for our full-time employees.
Our products are vegetarian and vegan, with more focus on vegan. Our goal with being plant-based is to reduce our impact on climate change. Composting is something we do of course. We are working to minimize the impact of our packaging. We do soft plastic packaging recycling through the City of Vancouver program. We’ll be moving towards pre-printed packaging because our labels have a bit of waste associated with the backing that we’d like to avoid. With having a frozen product, there’s a lot less waste. This also brings efficiency to the restaurant – with continued lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions, everything produced in the Bandidas kitchen, we can make the best use of the space, giving us the efficiency of two businesses running out of one brick and mortar location. If and when there’s excess food, we make sure to give back to our community by donating to those in need.
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