Naleway Catering – A Timeline

In 1942, Anne Sopko, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, started Anne’s Grill in the Sutherland Hotel restaurant in Winnipeg. One of her menu specialties was perogies. It was close to the CP Rail station and among travelers the restaurant had a reputation for serving delicious traditional food.

Leon Naleway, a pastor from Chicago of Polish decent, frequented the restaurant, and that constant patronage eventually lead to marriage in 1947. Their son Bob Naleway was born the following year.

Other patrons started requesting Anne’s food for their weddings, and two years later she moved to a new location on William Avenue, where the catering business really began to flourish. Moving once again, to Selkirk Avenue in 1953, they abandoned the restaurant business altogether and instead had a small banquet hall and kitchen, and this is how Naleway Catering got started.

We incorporated Naleway Catering in 1960. Also around this time, grocery stores started selling Naleway’s food in their delis. Three years later, Naleway Foods was born and quickly became bigger than the catering business, focusing mainly on fresh salads, perogies and cabbage rolls.

The next year we built an 8000 sq. ft. kitchen and we started selling outside the province. With the perogy business getting so big that we could no longer make handmade perogies, we had to look for more modern ways to keep up with the growing demand.

In 1973 we started mass-producing perogies by machine. Being an old-world Ukrainian food maker, this caused a bit of a problem with traditionalists, but the idea was to bring perogies to the masses. Former employees of Naleways have gone on to start other famous perogy restaurants and factories in Winnipeg, most notably Marion Staff of Alicia’s Restaurant.

In the ’80s, Naleway Foods was producing 240,000 perogies a day and as much as 50,000 pounds of potato salad on long weekends. We were also shredding lettuce and chopping onions for McDonald’s and Burger King, which spawned a pre-peeled raw vegetables business, though perogies were always the premier product.  We would even send fresh perogies to Toronto by airplane and semi-trailer, eventually opening a kitchen in Toronto to supply the southern Ontario market.

Back in Winnipeg we outgrew our location on Fife Street and in 1989 built a 20,000 sq. ft. federally inspected plant in Inkster Industrial Park that could produce 900 perogies per minute.

In 1995, Bob sold Naleway Foods and retired, though the plant is still in operation today. Bob maintained the catering business for several more years, until his children were old enough to get involved. Tamara, his daughter, instead chose to study interior design school at the University of Manitoba, and ten years ago moved to Vancouver to start her own company, Stem Interior Design.

Bob’s son Rob Naleway did get involved in the catering business, starting as a server and often washing dishes after school. In 2000, we bought our 7000 sq. ft. building on Main Street. Since Bob’s main focus had been Naleway Foods for so many years, the catering business was a relatively small operation at that time.

But Rob carried on the tradition of his grandma’s cooking, making all products from scratch while continually making small improvements to the recipes and the services offered.  As a result, through word of mouth and many satisfied customers, the catering business has grown every year for the past 15 years. Although Naleway Catering still offers the same quality food they are well known for, they now have a new venture called Perogy Planet.

Perogy Planet, our new retail outlet, specializes in fresh, from-scratch perogies, including old favourites such as cheddar and cottage cheese, as well as many new, not-typically-seen varieties like beef taco, pulled pork, and even blueberry. 

Traditional fare such as cabbage rolls, sauerkraut buns and meatballs are also available, all made fresh and in-house.

While catering will always be part of the Naleway family brand, they look forward to seeing where the new ventures in retail will lead.