Sudbury business receives $50K grant from Mazda Canada

Zaher’s Small Batch has received a $50,000 grant from Mazda Canada after being nominated by members of the community. 

Mazda Canada decided to help out local businesses that were either about to close their doors or already had due to the impacts of COVID-19. 

The owner of Zaher’s Small Batch, Deke Zaher, said he was at a loss for words when he received the news that he was one of three small businesses to receive $50,000, and the only small business in Ontario. 

He said the grant couldn’t have come at a better time, especially after he decided to close the doors to the storefront knowing he would be relocating his business on Elgin Street where he has been located since 2019.

"I mean, $50,000 is a big amount of money, but it’s even bigger to someone in a predicament like this. A small business owner who’s had to reconstruct his buisness two to three times through COVID just to survive and get here," said Zaher.

"That $50,000 was the ultimate support that I needed at this specific time in my life, to the point of me closing the doors and realizing I needed something else, and then bam, the $50,000 came."

Mazda Canada said this is all part of its million-dollar mission to help support small businesses, as well as some of its smaller Mazda dealerships.

"A lot of our dealerships are small businesses themselves and we’ve been helping them through the pandemic and we just saw an opportunity to extend this beyond them and help other small businesses in the communities we serve," said Sandra Lemaitre, director of public relations and corporate affairs with Mazda Canada.

"We didn’t know how many nominations we were going to get in total and so we just said we would randomly pick fifty from each region and go through those. It just turned out Zaher’s Small Batch had so many nominations. We just saw that there’s an outpouring for them."

Zaher said the money is going toward opening a new business in the current location on Elgin Street, as well as reopening Zaher’s Small Batch, only in a new location. 

"It’s bracing right now for that stability that I need and to buy me the time to work on this to get this up and running properly as well. It’s going to be called Zaher’s Red Claw: Boil House and then Zaher’s Pleasecake. There will be two new entities coming," said Zaher.

"So, it is going to subsidize that effort but it’s also going to the progressive development of Zaher’s Small Batch so that we can continue."

He said he will also be putting some of the money toward lengthening the shelf life of his hummus product. Zaher’s Small Batch will be relaunching in either spring or summer of next year.