With power restored in the wake of the ice storm, many local businesses are onto the next task — assessing the impact of lost sales and discarded products.

Mostapha Elmnini, owner of Alzahraa Halal Meats, thought his coolers would be down for a maximum of 72 hours when the shop’s power went out on Dec. 22. He kept the doors closed and kept hoping.

But electricity wasn’t restored to his Wexford-area shop until Thursday night.

“By Wednesday, I knew the product I had in my coolers was spoiled,” Elmnini said.

The outage couldn’t have come at a worse time for the store. With suppliers working holiday schedules, Elmnini had stocked up, filling every bit of space with beef, chicken, cheese and other perishable foods.

He tried to rent a generator to get the coolers back up and running, but nothing was available. Getting desperate, Elmnini loaded as much meat as he could into his three freezer trucks.

“But I didn’t have enough room,” he said. “I just had to wait and hope the power would be back sooner.”

Elmnini says he had to throw out about $25,000 worth of products. None of the losses will be covered by insurance, he said.

Elmnini wasn’t the only one getting rid of food during the power outage. When the power went out at Carter’s Ice Cream near Woodbine and Danforth Aves., owner Tammy Wiseberg decided to get generous, handing out 11.4-litre tubs of ice cream first to nearby businesses, then to passersby.

It was either give away the ice cream or let it melt in the freezer, the shop owner said.

Wiseberg had planned to close Carter’s Ice Cream over the holidays, so she didn’t miss out on any sales because of the power outage. But Wiseberg said she will have to rebuy the product that she lost.

“It’s a lot of money,” she said. “But it is what it is.”

Other businesses lost both sales and product because of the storm.

When the Bread-Stuff Bakery in North York’s Bayview Village lost power, owner Hootan Mahajeri managed to salvage some of the perishable ingredients used in his artisan baked goods. He packed expensive goods such as large amounts of butter into his vehicle and hauled them out to his cold garage in Richmond Hill.

“I only had a limited amount of room, so I had to prioritize what to bring,” said Mahajeri, who’s bakery has been open for just over a year.

The food he couldn’t transport — including dough, meat and eggs — had to be tossed.

The power outage also forced Mahajeri to close the bakery on Dec. 23 and 24, days when people usually pick up baked goods for holiday meals.

“There’s a lot of activity those two days and those two days were shot,” he said.

Bread-Stuff got their power back on Dec. 26, and staff spent Dec. 27 cleaning up and making fresh products before the bakery could reopen.

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“It was a setback. However, it wasn’t catastrophic. What can you really do?” said Mahajeri.

He estimates his bakery lost more than $4,000 because of the storm.

“It’s definitely significant enough for a small business,” he said. “At the end of the day, there’s a dollar amount attached to it in terms of losses. But it could have been much worse.”