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MARLON PATHER

Proprietor of The Butchers

As a semi-pro soccer player in Canada, Marlon Pather dreamed of playing professional one day. Scouts encouraged him to move to England, where he was given a trial with two teams. On a visit back home to Toronto, his soccer aspirations came to an abrupt end. Walking back from a video store, Pather was hit by a car when the driver lost control and ran a red light. He broke his back, and at age 19, any dream of playing professional soccer evaporated.

After months of convalescence in hospital and at home, Pather fell back on what he knew. As a teenager in Toronto, he’d worked in the meat department of a supermarket. “I learned a little about cutting meat,” says Pather, who retuned to England and got a job in a butcher shop in London, then took a second job at Sainsbury’s supermarket cutting meat. “I was working day and night,” he remembers. He later jumped to Planet Organic, where he helped open the meat department at the first organic supermarket in England, and where his customers included Bianca Jagger and Boy George.

In 1996 and now married, Pather returned to Toronto for what he thought would be a short time. “I said we’d stay for three months,” Pather relates. There were no organic butcher shops in Toronto, however, and Pather saw an opportunity. He landed a job as meat manager at The Big Carrot Natural Food Market, where he ran an organic butcher shop. “Organic was getting bigger and bigger in Canada,” he says.

In 2001, Pather noticed that an old-time butcher shop on Yonge Street was up for sale. The store had been in the neighborhood since the early 1940s. He loved the location and saw great possibilities for the tiny shop. He bid on it, bought it and renovated it to look like an old-fashioned English butcher. “I switched the shop to naturally-raised and organic meat right from the start,” Pather says, establishing The Butchers as Toronto’s first organic butcher shop. Business exploded. “A lot of my success has to do with the popularity of organics,” says Pather, “but also because people want value for their money. It has come to the point where customers want to know what farm the meat comes from -- and what the animals are fed.”

From the start, Pather made it a priority to connect with local farmers, including many small family-owned farms around Ontario. “The Butchers is not about mass marketing,” he says. “When I have a special product, my customers appreciate it.”