Janice Bartley
Founder and Executive Director
As a Black woman and an entrepreneur in her own right, Janice Bartley’s, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Foodpreneur Lab, personal mission is to level the playing field and open doors in underserved communities for ‘would be’ and established food entrepreneurs.
Founded in January 2019, Foodpreneur Lab was created to tackle systemic barriers head-on and pioneer new approaches to creating access for those historically prevented from fully participating in the food sector.
Janice brings a wealth of experience to the food sector as a former Operations Manager in Culinary & Hospitality management. Her 30+ years as an entrepreneur brought her to Food Starter as part of the Management team. She has mentored many young and experienced Chefs in the food industry and has been able to transition those mentoring skills to food entrepreneurs. Janice has worked with community-based Organizations, such as JumpStart Refugee Talent and Ryerson Diversity Institute, both of which support women entrepreneurs and newcomers. In 2019 her first mentee won the JumpStart pitch competition, and in 2020, she mentored participants in HERStartup, a newly created division of JumpStart Refugee Talent focused on providing support to newcomer women in food.
Janice also serves as a Mentor/Advisor with StartGBC, George Brown College, helping students in the food space. Janice serves as a Mentor to the Elizabeth Fry Society, EnterpRISE program supporting young women to launch or scale their businesses. She also provides consulting services to food entrepreneurs and serves as an Advisory Member for York Region Agriculture and Agri-Food Committee. Janice is the former General Manager for VenturePark Labs, a 20.000 sq. ft production facility that provides access to commercial shared kitchens and Accelerator spaces supporting food entrepreneurs. VenturePark Labs is a division of five communities within VenturePark owned by Dragons Den, Arlene Dickinson.
Food entrepreneurs are innovators.
Foodpreneur Lab is the only Canadian Black-woman founded and led nonprofit with a fierce national mandate to advance racial and gender equity in the food sector.
Our mission is to empower underserved communities and forge paths where Canadian foodpreneurs can draw from their cultural insight and lived experiences in food innovation.
By specifically targeting systemic barriers and using our lived experience lens we open the doors to networks, resources, industry, and financial knowledge that have been previously hidden from historically underrepresented communities.
We are improving access by pioneering new support models for foodpreneurs no matter where they are in their food entrepreneurship journey.
