The developer group behind this one had capital and a thesis: delivery-only operators in the GTA want a licensed kitchen without a five-year lease and a $400K buildout, and there is a shortage of buildings that can offer one. They had an industrial unit in a Mississauga employment area, zoned appropriately, sitting as a cold shell.
What they did not have was a clear picture of how much harder six kitchens are than one. It is not six times. The shared infrastructure is where the difficulty lives.
The challenge
Ventilation was the first structural decision. Six suites, each capable of running a fryer or a range, means Type 1 coverage in every suite. Six independent hood systems with six make-up air units is expensive, roof-heavy and a nightmare to balance. One central system is cheaper but couples the suites together — if one operator’s exhaust is out of service, everyone stops. We ended up with two zoned systems serving three suites each, with dedicated make-up air per zone and individually controlled exhaust fans, which keeps a single failure from taking the building down.
Sub-metering was the second. Each suite is separately licensed and separately billed, so gas, water and electricity all needed to be measured at the suite. Ontario’s requirements around sub-metering and the utility’s position on what could be revenue-grade versus check-metered shaped the entire electrical distribution design. The building went to an 800A three-phase service with a distribution room feeding six suite panels.
Third, and the part most people underestimate: Peel Public Health does not approve a ghost kitchen once. Each operator running a food premises needs their own plan review and their own approval. The base building can be designed to make those approvals easy or nearly impossible. Shared handwash stations, shared dish, and shared dry storage all raise questions about cross-contamination and operator accountability that have to be answered in the drawings, not verbally at inspection.
Fourth, site servicing. A 6,800 square foot industrial shell had a 100 mm sanitary connection sized for a warehouse washroom. Six kitchens and a shared dish room needed more, plus a 2,000-litre grease interceptor, plus a hot-water plant sized for simultaneous demand rather than for one kitchen at a time.
What NHFC did
Discover. We modelled the building as an operating business before designing it as a space. Peak simultaneous demand for gas, power, hot water and drainage across six suites at dinner service — not six times a single kitchen’s rated load, but a diversified figure with a defensible basis. That number set the service sizes, and it is the difference between a building that works at capacity and one that browns out at 6 p.m. on a Friday.
Lease structure came next. We wrote the suite fit-out standard that every incoming operator’s licence would be measured against, so the base building carried the mechanical, electrical, plumbing and finishes, and the operator brought only equipment. That is what makes a short-tenancy model viable.
Design. Coordinated drawings for the shell conversion plus a repeatable suite template: hood position, gas drop, floor drain, handwash, three-compartment sink, panel and data. Six identical suites with mirrored plumbing on the shared wet walls. Shared cold storage — two walk-in coolers and one freezer — was designed with individually lockable operator sections so a health inspector can identify whose product is whose.
Dispatch and staging at the front, deliberately separated from the production corridor so couriers never enter a food-preparation area. That single planning decision removed most of the questions the health unit would otherwise have asked.
Build. Pasha Construction executed the shell conversion: interior demising, upgraded sanitary service and interceptor, extensive underslab plumbing and sloped-to-drain pours across all six suites and the dish room, structural steel for the rooftop mechanical, and the loading and dispatch modifications. Shop Flooring supplied a heavy-duty resinous system throughout production and back of house with full cove base.
Deliver. ESA inspection on the new service and the six suite panels passed with no deficiencies. TSSA approved the gas train and the suite drops. Both ventilation zones were commissioned with balance reports before any operator took possession. Norpex supplied the shared warewashing, cold storage and the base equipment package for the first three operators.
Peel Public Health reviewed and approved the base building, then approved the first three operators’ individual plan reviews inside the same month, because each submission referenced an already-approved base building rather than starting from zero.
The outcome
Twenty-six weeks from blueprint to a building that could hand keys to an operator. Three suites were licensed and producing on opening; the remaining three were fully serviced and ready, and each subsequent operator’s health approval is now a short review against a known base building rather than a full plan review.
That is the real deliverable on a project like this. Not the opening date — the fact that operator number six can be cooking three weeks after signing.
Scope at a glance
- Diversified peak-demand modelling for gas, power, hot water and drainage across six suites
- Suite fit-out standard written to support short-tenancy licensing
- Cold shell conversion: demising, egress, fire separations, occupancy classification
- 800A three-phase service with revenue-grade sub-metering per suite
- Two zoned Type 1 hood systems with dedicated make-up air and independent exhaust control
- Upgraded sanitary service, 2,000 L grease interceptor, extensive underslab plumbing
- Sloped-to-drain slab across six suites and the shared dish room
- Shared cold storage with lockable per-operator sections
- Separated courier dispatch and staging area outside the production corridor
- Heavy-duty resinous flooring with integral cove base throughout
- Building permit, ESA, TSSA, base-building and per-operator Peel Public Health plan reviews
