Our History

The Brown's family business, Brown's Dairy, was started by the late James W. (1st generation) and the late James S. Brown (2nd generation) as a dairy farm and 1 horse delivery service in Kingston, Ontario, Canada in 1929. The Brown family was fresh from a move from Wolfe Island, across the river from Kingston, to a new 300 acre farm in North Kingston. Then, 16 year old James, with a horse and sleigh or buggy, would deliver 1 pint glass containers of fresh milk for .01 cent per pint! In the Winter the young milk man would find a single frozen penny in the bottom of milk bottles waiting to be replaced with a fresh pint for another penny. Getting a 100% price increase to .02 cents per pint created so much grief that even the uneducated entrepreneur knew that there was a challenging future ahead if he stayed in that business.

Many hours on a sleigh or buggy in cold or heat gives a young man plenty of time to think about his future and thus life on the farm evolved. Recognizing the growing interest in soft drink consumption Brown's Beverages, a soft drink bottling and delivery operation, was formed in the 1930's. James and his brother Charles worked tirelessly making, bottling and delivery refreshing drinks to surrounding stores and special occasions such as parties, picnics or fairs. The Brown Brothers invented a drink call Stubby Orange which was an orange and fresh cream based products that sold in stubby glass bottles painted with a cute cartoon character on them. If only that had been as popular as a new brand called Coca Cola or Pepsi, how life would have changed.

In the early 1950's James Brown and several other Canadian entrepreneurs, including Alan Baker the founder of Versa Foods (now Aramark), went to a trade show in Chicago to see something new called an automatic vending machine. It didn't take long to realize that having a machine deliver drinks to customers made tremendous sense and Brown's Beverages gave way to technology and morphed into Brown's Automatic Vending, one of the first vending machine companies in Canada. Before long, nearly every consumable product could be purchased from a vending machine and the brown bag and lunch pail started to disappear as a new consumer model evolved.

Through the 1970's Brown's grew and adapted to client and customer needs into today's model, Brown's Fine Food Services, a dining services provider serving over 150,000 people daily where they work, play and get educated. Through the years, the 3 sons of James S. Brown worked in many roles in the business, and in 1975 James and Paul Brown became the owners when they purchased the business from their father. Phillip Brown formally joined the business in 1985 and today is Brown's President and CEO.

Brown's currently employs 700+ people. Today's business entails creating a relationship with an organization that has a consistent population attending their facility that need food and beverage services. From that point Brown's develops a model that can include the design, construction, financing, equipping, staffing and operating of the food services. In the majority of cases the cafeteria infrastructure is in place and people and programs are the priority. Typical assignments could be high schools, call centres, colleges, recreational facilities, Government, private industry, commercial and industrial buildings. Depending on the building population vending machines either augment cafeteria services or stand alone as the source of service. Brown's engages national brand power in their products and services and currently has Tim Horton's, Pita Pit, Subway and Starbucks in their array of offerings.

Brown's also excels in all types of special event and catering services ranging from social gatherings, concerts, corporate picnics and BBQ's, for 1000's or as small as a sandwich and dessert platter for a more intimate affair.

In all cases, each business location or department has a Brown's Manager Leader that is supported with expertise, products, policies and programming. This allows them to work relatively autonomously as an independent business person would. Constant feedback of financial and operational data, best practice information exchange, together with maintaining solid client and team relationships, are key drivers to success. Brown's is currently Canada's largest privately owned food services company and continues to grow and change.