They’re the Independent Ones.
Forty-one per cent of Canadian food service businesses are operating at a loss or just breaking even. In 2019 that number was twelve. Roughly 7,000 restaurants closed in 2025, landing hardest on independents. Another 2,500 are forecast for 2026. Insolvencies in accommodation and food service ran about seven and a half per cent higher in the first half of this year than the last.
The part nobody says out loud is where the losses land. They are concentrated among independent, full-service, mid-market operators. Canada is not losing restaurants at random. It is losing the specific ones. What replaces them is chains, value formats, and standardized experience. Lab director Sylvain Charlebois said independent restaurants are likely to bear the brunt, and the report warned their disappearance would narrow Canada’s culinary landscape and reduce experimentation.
This is the same story playing out everywhere at once. Big survives because big can absorb a bad quarter. Small dies because small cannot. And what gets lost is not efficiency. It is the room that knew your name, the producer whose family has farmed the same four hectares for a century, the server who could have run the place herself if anyone had ever shown her how.
Trina Plamondon has been on the wrong end of that math before. She lost the house, the law firm, the money and nearly the kids in her divorce. The law firm still exists, just without her, then COVID shut down the next successful business. What remained constant was her work inside systems as an executive, an educator, an advocate & a volunteer. Decades of vulnerable services taught her the same lesson every time. Systems built to serve everyone always let people fall through the cracks.
So she built Carpa Vino to run the other way. Fractional, Not Full Time
A dedicated wine hire costs an independent restaurant between $55,000 and $100,000 fully loaded. It is a position that is tough to justify. So the wine program becomes nobody’s job. It gets bought from a rep carrying four hundred labels on a commission wage, whose incentive is volume, not the operator’s margin. The result is a list nobody designed, a house pour nobody trades up from, and dead stock aging quietly on a shelf while the operator fights over food cost.
Fractional wine management splits the cost of that expertise across several venues instead of one. The same logic as a fractional CFO or managed IT. A small department’s worth of work, centralized. Buying, list design, margin management, staff training, the guest-facing story. For a fraction of a salary nobody could afford anyway.
Not everyone needs a sommelier. Some just need someone who owns the outcome.
Producers the Big System Skipped
Two financial holding companies control a large majority of the Canadian wine shelf. Their business requires volume, consistency, and lots big enough to fill a national listing. That is not a moral failure. It is arithmetic. But it means an entire category of producer never gets seen: family estates working small, low-intervention, in quantities that a national distributor cannot be bothered to move.
Carpa Vino carries five of them, that scarcity is not a limitation. It is the point. It means a restaurant three blocks away cannot pour the same bottle, and the operator gets something genuinely their own rather than the wine every other room on the street is already serving.
Women Who Own What They Sell
The people who actually sell wine in this country mostly do it on a commission wage for someone else’s company. Below them, hospitality staff sell it every night for tips and own none of it.
Carpa Vino’s model turns that around. Women from hospitality come in as independent contractors, running their own business. They keep fifty per cent of the profits and learn how to run the whole thing along the way. Not employees. Not hoping for tips. Building something that belongs to them, selling into the same rooms where they used to work the floor.
Why It Matters Now
The forecast says Canada loses thousands more independent restaurants before this is over. Some of that is unavoidable. But a meaningful share of it is margin left on the table by operators who never had anyone owning the highest-margin category on their menu.
Wine is the last real lever most independents have not pulled. Not because they do not care. Because nobody ever made the expertise affordable enough to reach them.
“A billion dollars in wine moves through this province every year, and only a handful of people control who gets in,” Plamondon says. “It’s a door that’s locked for most, so I made a key and walked right in. Now I’m holding it open.”
Two provinces. Five producers. A model built small enough that nobody falls through the cracks.