‘They truly care’: How Country Manor Kitchen Got Its Wheels & Overcame Bumps on the Road

For a whole week, Kim Stinson and her team had been hand-pressing 1,700 burger patties made from scratch. There, in her new Country Manor Kitchen trailer with a full restaurant kitchen, they’d laid everything out: the buns, the plates, the napkins. When she had a moment to think, which was not often, Kim wondered: What will they think of my food?

Then, on the Interior Provincial Exhibition (IPE) opening day, the hungry people came.

“People were lined up all the way around the corner,” says Kim, whose food truck became the highest selling vendor that first year at the IPE, an Armstrong, BC, rodeo and fair attended by tens of thousands. The fresh burgers and perogies, and the system she’d set up to have the food already hot and plated worked. “We were fast.”

That was 2016 and Kim had only just bought her kitchen on wheels, which came with a handful of bookings, including the IPE. Creating her business, Country Manor Kitchen, and that mobile trailer, almost hadn’t happened.

“It started because I was trying to help this couple with their catering for a wedding and ended up doing it for them. Out of that job I got two more catering jobs and within a year I was so booked I thought, I have to go back to my roots and do this. So, I got a business plan together and someone said to go to Community Futures, so I did.”

In the process of developing her business plan alongside Community Futures North Okanagan loans advisor Rob Short, Stinson came across a food trailer for sale in Vernon.

“I implemented the trailer unit into the plan and he loved it.”

Soon, Stinson was approved for the business loan and Country Manor Kitchen was touring festivals and weddings, serving up roast beef dinners and roasted vegetable medleys with produce from local farms.

“I really spent zero dollars on advertising. The food was speaking for itself.”

A year later, just a few weeks after another wildly successful IPE, Stinson had a stroke. She was in the hospital for 80 days and early on, she began to worry: What will I do about the loan payments?

“Community Futures stepped up and said, let’s do interest-only payments to get you through this. It was huge. It was lifesaving,” says Stinson. “If I had been with a bank, I probably would have had to shutter so it meant the world to me, no doubt about it.”

Several months later, Stinson was recovering and her staff agreed to come back to work the handful of weddings that had already been booked for the spring and summer of 2018.

“Nobody told me to stop. It was not something I even thought of. I had this commitment to these brides and to that loan. It was never an option not to go forward. Even when I was in the hospital, I had this white board and I got out a pen and wrote ‘forward’ on it.”

So, there she was, pulling up the trailer and listening to guests passing by as the beef or the chicken was roasting, cooked fresh on site.

“You can smell it cooking and the kitchen opens right up so you can have a look. It creates an atmosphere. People are always gobsmacked at how good the food looks and I do thrive on that feedback.”

Stinson hit another roadblock, Covid, and turned again to Community Futures Okanagan and its Momentum program for women business owners. Through the peer mentoring and one-to-one coaching, Stinson navigated contracts and policies around wedding cancellations, and just carrying on.

“I think if I wasn’t with Community Futures, I would have gone under, hands down.”

Within two years, as restrictions lifted, Country Manor Kitchen was adopted for the corn maze season at O’Keefe Ranch and Stinson had found an amazing red seal chef to help run it along with other catering events. Things were going so well, they started scouting permanent locations and found a longstanding restaurant that was closing in Armstrong.

Country Manor Kitchen is now open on Pleasant Valley Road with its aesthetic of ‘granny’s kitchen’: antique mis-matched plates, a vintage milkshake machine and meals home-cooked with love, like Irish stew poutine and pulled pork salads. Instead of buying a dishwasher, Stinson gives people with diverse abilities dishwashing jobs. And she gives customers advice about starting their own business.

“I tell people about Community Futures all the time. I say you can go great places with them. They truly honestly care that you make things work.”

Ready to grow your business? Learn how our business loans and resources can help you reach your goals. https://www.futuresbc.com/