Fresh A Fare

Great selection of soups, sandwiches, breads, salads and dressings. Great friendly service too! Very reasonable prices. Some unusual salad dressings such as coconut lime and wasabi. Loves this place for a nice lunch!

This place is very near my house so it’s a quick popover. Love all the food the freshness and the service but the ordering process is confusing and even to this day still makes me a little anxious. All the soups are great especially the cheeseburger. Worth the experience by far.

A friend in Barrie introduced me to this place and my first meal was great. With my job, I bring clients lunch probably 3−4X/week, so I thought the next time I have a lunch appointment, I’d use them.
I got there at 11:45am with two people in line ahead of me and two people behind me and ordered 6 sandwiches. At which point I received an exasperated look. They started making my sandwiches while huffing and puffing… I really didn’t know what was wrong, but upon completion of my order I was told, ‘Next time call ahead, this is the lunch rush’ and was handed a menu. I truly was shocked, it was only SIX SANDWICHES???
I thought, OK, that was a one off, so the next time, I called ahead and ordered 8 sandwiches at which point I was told, ‘We don’t take orders after 11am’…it was 11:07am and I needed them for 1pm?
Okay, so maybe I just happened to have them on a bad day. I was driving to Collingwood for clients and thought, let’s see what time they open and searched them on the Internet. Open at 10am, so I arrived at 10:10am, walked in and was greeted by the same small girl, ‘Sorry, we don’t open until 10:30am’! I said to her, ‘But the door says 10:00am and so does the Internet’, upon which time she said, ‘yeah, that hasn’t been changed YET’. However, she called one of the other girls, whom asked what I wanted and I said ‘6 sandwiches’, when I received the response, ‘When do you want them?’ And I said, ‘well…now’. The girl then said, ‘well, I have to make 50 sandwiches now… Sorry’ with this sarcastic tone.
Honestly, I have never experienced customer service like this anywhere and truly don’t know why I kept going back. It was reminiscent of ‘The Soup Nazi’ on Seinfeld. Truly Unbelievable, I will never be back!

You can’t compare this place to Subway or Mr Sub. It’s on another level. Fresh A Fare should put those poor quality chains out of business. The sandwiches, soups, salads and service here is wonderful. The restaurant is clean, the food is fresh (as the name implies) and the flavor embarrasses the above mentioned competitors (if you want to call them that). Honestly, there’s no comparison. Once you take a bite of a sandwich at Fresh A Fare, you won’t step foot in another sandwich shop.
Why is Fresh A Fare better? While it’s more expensive, you’re paying for quality. The bread alone (which is baked on site) is worth a trip. It tastes like something you’d expect from a local bakery. The meats don’t taste like store bought, prepacked meats, rather fresh sliced stuff.
This is a great place to come for a quick lunch. The line moves well. The staff is extremely friendly. You’ll feel like grandma made you a soup, sandwich and salad by hand — and enjoy a fresh taste with each bite. Well done, guys!

Wonderful, soul filling food. Lots of vegetarian options. Long lines @ lunch. Worth the extra dollars. High quality food. Friendly staff.

In short: five stars for fresh, healthy, tasty food, but one star for a chaotic environment and confusing order process.
I’m a sucker for a good sandwich, and Fresh A Fare definitely delivers in that regard. They offer a wide range of fillings, from tuna salad to smoked meat to brie with tomato, which can be customized with a variety of breads, toppings, and sauces. They also have several types of soup, made fresh every day — the cheeseburger is well worth trying — and made-​to-​order salads available with a wide range of ingredients including proteins, nuts, and veggies. For the gluten-​intolerant crowd, they even do «breadless sandwiches,» using blanched collard greens as sturdy and mildly flavoured wraps. Everything is, as the name suggests, exceptionally fresh, and also absolutely delicious: they bake their own bread, cure their own meat, and make their own dressings and sauces, and you really can taste the difference. Add in a good selection of bottled drinks, fresh-​brewed iced tea and lemonade, and tempting cookies and carrot cake, and you’ve got all the components of a great little café. Prices are reasonable, too, given the quality of the food: sandwiches run around $ 6 – 8, as do meal-​sized salads, while a cup or soup or a side salad will cost about $ 4.
So, why only three stars?
Well, mostly because ordering a sandwich during the lunch hour at Fresh A Fare feels like ordering a stock on a Wall Street broker’s floor five minutes before trading closes on Friday afternoon. It’s loud, it’s disjointed, it’s very busy, and there are people rushing every which way and shouting over each other to be heard. The ordering system at Fresh A Fare is the least organized thing imaginable, and while the half-​dozen staff behind the counter are invariably cheerful and pleasant, they seem to spend more time getting in each other’s way than they do actually working on orders. There’s no division of labour, and no assembly line system: instead, each staff member helps a single person at a time, which results in six customers talking over each other to communicate their orders to six different employees, who then elbow each other for space over a very small prep counter to try to make six different things simultaneously. The whole process ends up taking three times as long as it should.
Fresh A Fare actually makes me long for the bad old days of Reggie’s sandwich shop downtown. The food there was mediocre at best, and outright awful at times — I have unpleasant memories of crunching into egg salad that was about 30% eggshell by volume — but they did, at least, have a slick and efficient ordering system: grab an order form, tick off the boxes for your desired bread, filling, and toppings, hand it in, take a seat, and wait for your number to be called. If Fresh A Fare implemented a system like that, I’d stop in for lunch every week. As it is, though, if I love a restaurant’s food, but hate the entire process of getting that food, I’m probably just going to go somewhere else.

We ate at the location on Welham road. The sandwiches were very good, the turkey cold cuts are apparently store made without all the preservatives of store bought meats. The Schnitzel sandwich was excellent and the mushroom soup was one of the best I have eaten. Overall the food was excellent. THe only downfall was that it was very busy during the lunch hour and the staff at the counter didn’t seem particularly efficient. The cashier seemed to be holding up the line and with only one working that bottlenecked the rest of the process.
Overall an excellent place to eat lunch, just give yourself some extra time.

My wife and I were coming back from the cottage area and hungry around the plazas in north barrie, with all those confusing stores and options, when we saw this tiny store, with a statement on the front about smoked meat and fresh food. We thought, let’s give it a try, better than plastic fast food!
The best choice we’ve made, many sandwiches, small salads with the size of big salads, cheeseburger soups among other fresh soups… All said to be local made, including the smoked meat.
Simple, well designed place, fair price… In our opinion it must be the best cost value family food around these busy confusing plazas!

The best fresh sandwiches around!!! Roasted turkey, egg salad and Reuben sandwiches are our choices when we go.