When my family bought our current home, which is two doors down from today’s MacGregor Homegrown Business highlight, Bison General, a legitimate part of the budgeting that went into our decision to purchase was recognizing just how much our coffee budget would need to increase! There is something about a Canadiana Double/Double from Bison General that just hits the spot every time.

This week, I had a chance to chat with Mike Froese who together with his wife Jen own and run Bison General, about how it is that their store is able to play such a special role in our town. The answer they had for me? Quality and a love for both what they are doing and more importantly, who they are doing it for.

Tell me the story of how Bison General began.

Both myself and my wife grew up right here in southern Manitoba, but headed off to the West Coast as young adults where we met, fell in love, and settled down. We raised our family just outside Vancouver, and for the 20+ years we spent there, we enjoyed all the amenities that living on the West Coast had to offer. One of our favourite weekend destinations was Pike Place Market in Seattle, where we got to taste and see what living local was all about.

Living where we did afforded us the opportunity to learn and be inspired by our surroundings. Just down the road in almost every direction were places that offered some of the world’s best coffee, flower markets, organic vegetable greenhouses, and restaurants of every ethnicity. We loved being a part of our surroundings, but we also loved and longed to be home on the prairies.

It was always a dream of mine to own my own business. Even as a child, I used to dream of being an entrepreneur. Jen too has always dreamed of one day running her own kitchen where she would be able to express her passion for food and her culinary creativity. Jen is completely self-taught, and our time spent on the West Coast both influenced and inspired her love of good food - from organic gardening to delicious and healthy cooking. However, we both realized that the cost of beginning a venture like that on the West Coast was out of our grasp, so the dream to do something special like this was always pushed to the back burner.

Then in 2017, only a few years after moving back to MacGregor, we learned that a local business in town was going up for sale, and we realized that this was our opportunity to seize. We would take all the best that the business already offered, and combine that with everything we learned and had been inspired by through the years of West Coast living, and combine that to give our community something new and special. We were told that the building we are in was originally MacGregor’s General Store, hence our business’s new name: Bison General. We feel the name honours both the present and the past, and we are excited to continue to move, grow, and create as we move into the future.

So what does Bison General do specifically?

First, we are a local eatery that offers fresh high-quality food, baking and specialty hand-crafted coffees and other drinks. It’s important to us to not skimp on ingredients nor cut corners on the processes of making great quality food and beverages. We realize that making everything from scratch and using only fresh and quality ingredients means we sometimes run out or can’t offer certain items that our customers have come to love, but it is very important to us to never compromise on quality.

We are also a flower shop that offers flower market style bouquets. We realize that this is a different way of doing flowers than what has been done in the area before, but we want to give our community the best floral designs while remaining true to our own convictions and creativity. Here again, Jen, who arranges all of the bouquets in the store, is self-taught. Being an avid gardener and lover of all things beautiful inspires her creativity and results in beautiful fresh-cut, hand-tied creations that we are proud to offer our community. For this reason, it is our privilege to be the only flower market in North Norfolk.

And finally, we are a local gift store that offers many locally-made gifts and food items. Manitoba has such a wealth of creative artisans and producers. From bath and beauty products to home decor items, and all kinds of delicious foods, Manitoba has an abundance of products that we are proud to have on our shelves. Of course, not all the gift items we sell are Manitoba-made, but Manitoba-made products will remain our focus. We believe in shopping and supporting local, and so the shelves at Bison General will always have a Made-in-Manitoba focus.

How has running Bison General gone over the years?

We’ve only owned the business since December of 2017. Over the past two-and-a-half years of owning the business, our big takeaway is that this is a community that is rooting for us, and has shown us a lot of grace. This is the first time Jen and I have owned a business, and that means we went through a lot of growing pains. As we learn how to do things…and then how to do things better, our amazing community has been supportive, encouraging, patient, and gracious.

We absolutely love MacGregor and consider ourselves blessed to be able to do what we do here. This community makes us want to do more, and be better for the people that live here. Both Jen and I just want to take this opportunity to say how absolutely thankful we are to everyone who supports us. You are a special community and we are proud to call this our home.

How has COVID impacted your organization?

COVID’s impact on our business has reached every aspect of what we do. We have a few students that work for us part-time that we are excited to bring back some day, but for now, we just aren’t able to. We’ve also had to completely close our dining room and re-vamp our menu to address this change. For example, Jen and I have always wanted to incorporate pizzas onto our menu at Bison, and as it happens, it was only a few weeks before COVID hit Manitoba that we introduced pizzas as a menu option for our guests. Looking back, we can see how perfectly timed this was for us, and what a life-saving (and business-saving) venture that turned out to be.

We realized that our menu at the time would not be a sustainable business option if we couldn’t have people in our store. We were in a way forced to make the decision to drop most of what we were doing food-wise, and focus our attention on how to do things differently. Pizza was the way we could feed families instead of only individuals and since we only had Jen in the kitchen, we needed a way to feed as many people as possible. Looking back, we can see that we were set up at the perfect time to become a pizza place…and so that became our focus. Jen’s pizza dough recipe that she has been using and perfecting for years has been the base of all our pizzas and she simply tops them with her creativity.

As time moves forward, and as we find new strides…we have been able to start to bring back some of the menu options we offered pre-COVID, and we’ve also been able to play and introduce new items as well (sushi anyone?). We are looking forward to being able to open our dining room again someday and finding out what a return to normal will mean for future menus at BG.

Aside from the impact on our kitchen, COVID has impacted flower sales and our gift sales as well. For a long time we were not ordering new products in as we took a hit financially, and we weren’t sure for a long time if we were going to be able to keep our doors open, or if we were going to be shut down like some of our suppliers were. We are very grateful that we were able to keep our doors open throughout this pandemic, however, we aren’t out of the woods yet. We are now slowly starting to purchase new items for the store again. With Fathers Day just around the corner, we are excited to be bringing in a few new products to help celebrate the Dads in our community.

Uncertainty continues to be the theme for us during COVID. Even though phase 2 of the provinces reopening strategy allows for restaurants to open their dining rooms at 50% capacity (and phase 3 higher still), they are still mandating that physical distancing measures apply to the tables and chairs in all dining rooms. In addition, those tables and chairs need to be physically distanced from the general public that may be in the store as well. We have such a small space, that without an overhaul of the entire building, we simply cannot situate tables and chairs in a way that accommodates these restrictions. So for now, we will continue to operate as we have been, and rely on our incredible customers and public to continue to look out for us, as we continue to do our best for them.

Any additional details that would encourage people to help Bison General Now?

As we’ve already stated, MacGregor is an amazing community that has been supportive, encouraging, patient and gracious to us. We are still in the middle of this pandemic, and although Manitoba is doing really well, our businesses continue to operate with restrictions that must be followed. As Jen and I hear of restaurants that operate too loosely with the restrictions and are getting heavily fined or shut down, we are careful to do what is required of us.

That being said, there are several ways people can show us their support.

First, and most obviously, people can shop at Bison General; check out our gift items, order a meal, buy a drink, get flowers for a friend, try our pizza or one of our other tasty treats.
Second, tell others about us. I’m still amazed at how many local people still don’t know what we all do at Bison. There are still people in our community that don’t know we are a restaurant. We are seeing people from Portage make regular weekly trips out to Bison to pick up their favourite treats, but I’m always surprised when someone from MacGregor walks into the store for the first time and has no idea that we offer the services that we do. So one of the simplest ways people can support us is by telling their friends and neighbours that we are here, and what we are all about.
Third, people can help us now and well into the future by interacting with us on social media by visiting our webpage, Facebook, Instagram, and leaving positive feedback on TripAdvisor [editor’s note, links can all be found below]. This helps drive more traffic to us online, and will help people discover us in the future when people start travelling again.