Gd2go owner Ben Farella says the past ten years have flown by in a hurry.
As more people incorporate healthy eating – and better choices – into their lives, the North Bay restaurant is getting ready to celebrate a full decade of providing those health-conscious consumers with plenty of options for fresh food, fast.
“The whole world, in our opinion, wants to eat healthier,” Farella said. “It doesn’t matter who you are, or where you’re from. Down deep, we believe that everyone would love to do that.”
Gd2go fills a particular niche in the city, giving people the choice to save time, while also maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
And it’s not a passing fad: the push towards healthier lifestyles goes beyond any particular age group.
“The older generation are being forced to eat healthier because their doctors are telling them to do that,” Farella said. “And the younger generation wants to eat healthy.”
It comes to everyone having a choice, and gd2go steps in to fill that need.
“There’s always a choice in life, like is this next bite of food going to be helping my health or is it going to be hurting it?” Farella said. “We can make bad choices and good choices and at gd2go we try to offer selections on the good side.”
One of the challenges, Farella said, is getting people to recognize that healthier options can taste better than regular fast food, not to mention the benefits that accompany it.
“When people think it’s healthy, sometimes they think that it won’t necessarily taste good,” he said. “We’d like to challenge that. We think ours is not only better for you, but it tastes better.”
That included items like gd2go’s Chicken Caesar Wraps, which includes a dressing completely natural and free of processed chemicals, or their gluten-free Muffin Bites, which use half the amount of sugar their fast-food competitors use.
The idea, Farella said, is to take traditional eating, and deliver it in a healthy way.
“When you eat better, you’re more productive,” he said. “When you eat better, you have greater clarity, it leads to making better decisions.”
“That’s really the problem that we’re trying to solve every day for people, and we’ve figured out how to do it quickly. Deliver fresh food, fast.”
Even with its quick delivery, don’t categorize gd2go a fast-food restaurant, Farella said. He describes the restaurant as straddling the area between fast casual and quick service.
“You can come in, but you’re not going to have to sit down for two hours,” he said. “You can order and grab-and-go in five minutes, or you can go through the drive thru.”
“Although other restaurants and plenty of fast food places do that, we just do it better, at an elite level.”
Healthy options for everyone
Farella said the staff at gd2go also prides itself on being able to accommodate almost any request, or any variety of different food choices. Having something for everyone, Farella said, is gd2go’s speciality.
“For example if you’ve got a family that wants to come in and dad’s a meat-and-potatoes guy, we’ll have something for him. And maybe mom’s trying keto, we’ve got something for her. Maybe the son loves everything, but has a gluten intolerance, we have plenty of GF options, and maybe the daughter is vegan, well, we’ve got several vegan options.”
“There’s very few places where you can get all of those dietary restrictions handled, but we do it at a really high level,” Farella said.
The food – not to mention the service – has been such a quality feature of the restaurant that Farella said they’ve been able to build a loyal clientele over the last decade.
“We’ve got people coming in from out of town, for example, making a stop as they pass through on the way to Sudbury, just to come in to get their favourite Ramen Bowl.”
“The Buddha Bowl has also been a hit,” he said. “You get a choice of brown rice, or superfood quinoa, or you can use cauliflower rice as your base. Follow that up with an array of vegetables and toppings, if you like.”
“We take traditional things, and just make them a little bit healthier.”
The Funky Monkey, easily one of gd2go’s most popular smoothies, is another one of their menu items that has developed a loyal following. Farella said he has a pretty good idea what makes it a winner with his customers.
“In our Funky Monkey, we make it with an in-house peanut butter,” he said. “We actually take real peanuts and grind them ourselves, right here.”
“Then we add bananas and almond milk, with very few additives. After that it’s a little bit of frozen yogurt or protein powder, whatever the customer chooses.”
On an average summer day, Farella says, staff whips out 40-50 Funky Monkeys. Another example of healthy, great-tasting food served fast.
Healthy choices, 10 years in the making
To celebrate a decade in the business, Farella is now getting ready to unveil a new aspect to gd2go’s business model.
“We’re ready to grow even more,” Farella said. “We’re looking into various aspects and growing into areas where we can offer food accessibility, whether it’s catering, whether you’re having a wedding or you’re having an event or corporate function, we want to be able to create more access and offer new and improved menu items.”
To that end, Farella is announcing their fall harvest feast in September.
“We’re going to have David, our head chef come in for the event, and we’re going to give the hundreds of people that come in the chance to taste from an array of new menu items, not only in the restaurant, but in our new catering division.”
More details can be found by clicking here. Farella says the harvest feast is not only a way to showcase some of their new wares, but also to thank the community for the steady support they’ve been given.
“At the end of the day, it’s not what you do. It’s not what you say it’s, it’s how you make people feel,” Farella said.
“So if we can provide a little bit of goodness, we’ve done a good job. One of our taglines here at gd2go is ‘just be better.’”
“Just be better, be kinder, be nicer whenever you can. That’s a big part of what we do.”