Montreal's 'Willy Wonka' Has An Exotic Foods Empire & His Story Is A Sweet One

Rare snacks and drinks are a booming market across Canada, with Montreal hosting dozens of "exotic" food shops that even sell via third-party platforms like Uber Eats and DoorDash.

To the average consumer, these storefronts may seem like the origin of such non-Canadian specialties as Rap Snacks chips or Prime energy drinks. But there's someone supplying Bon Bon Shop and Snaxies with their product, and he's already marketing himself as "the plug of your plug."

Louis-Gabriel Bonnafé, the young owner and founder of Rare Drank exotic sodas and snacks, is friendly, charismatic and deeply invested in the rare food trade in Canada, where he started his career under a decade ago.

From soda smuggler to snack sovereign

An anonymized interview with Vice in 2019 covered Bonnafé's start hawking (illegally, mind you) clear Crush cream sodas, but his enterprise has expanded (legally) in the past few years into something much bigger than a one-man rare soda trade.

Now five years into his career in imported and hard-to-find snacks — often shorthanded as "exotic," despite the word's complex and often unsavoury implications — Bonnafé has become somewhat of an expert on the rare snack trade, with a particular interest in unusual drinks.

Here, "exotic" can be broken down into its core definition: originating from elsewhere. The foods and drinks Bonnafé trades in are manufactured only in specific locations, meaning sourcing them is more expensive and logistically complex than sourcing locally-made drinks or snacks.

Drinks are more challenging to transport than snacks, since liquids are notoriously heavy and come in pallets, rather than smaller, mail-shipping-compatible units, Bonnafé explained over Zoom.

The 'fizz-tory' of Rare Drank

"Rare Drank is really very specialized in soda, soft drinks [and juices]," since the competition is fiercer when shipping more manageable dry goods like candies and snacks.

This specialization has existed since the very beginning of Bonnafé's career, which got its unusual start at a smoke shop on Ocean Drive in Miami.

"The owner was outside trying to gain customers on the street, talking to everyone he could," Bonnafé tells me. "When he asked me, 'Where are you from?' I just replied to him that I was from Montreal. And at that moment, his eyes became very, very wide."

The man brought Bonnafé into his store and showed him a small fridge packed with sodas. At the time, Bonnafé had never seen anything like it. "The first pop he took out was the Crush clear cream soda," which is exclusively produced in Montreal and isn't distributed or sold anywhere outside of Quebec.

"So for him," Bonnafé explained, "it's a very, very, very hard to find, top rare international [product]." The store owner told Bonnafé that he was selling the sodas for $10 a pop (pun intended, thank you very much). But he couldn't find a good supplier — his soda guy in New York could only provide limited quantities.

Long story short, Bonnafé "basically became the Crush clear source for these American guys." That's when Rare Drank as a brand was born. At the time, he didn't know anything about import laws or the Montreal drinks market, but over time his business partners encouraged him to branch out and bring external brands into the Canadian market.

Frozen treats, cash receipts & the pricey passage of Canadian snacks abroad

Many Canadian products, he soon learned, are hot commodities elsewhere in the world. Take the KitKat Drumstick ice cream, for example. "It's $1 in every IGA or Metro, but me? I sell them for a high, high price in America. These ones can be sold [for] like $5 a bar." But he's careful to distinguish what he does from pure self-interest or profit motives. "It's a way to showcase culture," he said.

Gen Z is really into rare snacks, but Bonnafé soon learned that hunting for "exotic" edibles and beverages is a hobby enjoyed by far more than extremely-online young people. "You know, there's moms who like to hunt candies all the time, there's older, elderly people who just have little fun to go get something on the end of the street, you know, it's just an activity for them at the same time."

"It's a really a revolution of the candy industry," Bonnafé said, explaining that the rise of limited-edition products in the 90s and, of course, the internet, completely changed what's possible in the industry.

Pickles, Prime, and the power of social media

Bonnafé can follow dozens of Instagram accounts to find potential customers, track new trends like freeze-drying candies (a handy trick that, besides providing tasty results, can up the shelf life of near-expired candies to an almost indefinite scale), and keep an eye on which products are most in demand.

The product that surprises him the most by its popularity? Individually packaged, flavoured pickles. This makes me laugh since hot pickles are a Southern U.S. gas station staple, but I can't deny that their international popularity is surprising.

His biggest challenge right now is finding large-scale sources for the popular American energy drink Prime, a 2023 new release that is promoted by massive YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI.

According to Bonnafé, these drinks aren't distributed by the manufacturers, but rather by a range of third-party distributors with whom Rare Drank has plenty of connections. But with Prime, "it's crazy, they give them so many little quantities that they only have enough for their stores," Bonnafé says. "Instead of getting a pallet a week and we sell it in a week, they'll directly [say], 'Okay, you have 15 stores, here's 30 cases.'"

These factors combine to make the drink shockingly expensive for a can of energizing soda. Snaxies, based in Montreal, sells them at $6.99 a can.

In America, directly from the distributors (which are currently sold out of the drink in nearly every variety), you can buy a 12-pack for $29.99 USD plus tax, which leaves each can be priced at approximately $2.50 USD.

Besides bottlenecking (ha ha) the supply, distributors, and manufacturers rely on other tactics to discourage the second- and third-hand rare products trade. Bonnafé tells me one example in which the shelf life of Sprite Tropical (a Canadian exclusive flavour) was reduced, seemingly artificially, to hamper importation. "Back like a year ago when I was buying it, I still had like three to four months left on the expiry of a usual bottle," Bonnafé explained, adding that the average shelf life of a soda is usually in that four-month range.

"But this year, they had a little meeting, I guess," (please note that this has not been independently confirmed by MTL Blog), "and they decided that this edition in particular, it would [sell] with only a month left [on the expiration date]. Why do you do this? It sells very quick and they know it. So they just give a little less [time], but it will still sell basically the same. But it's going to be way harder to export this — to take time in the trucks for the transportation," by the time the soda arrives, "I'll basically have a week left" to sell it.

These moves are possible, Bonnafé says, because of how strong the snack and drink market is in the United States. There are of course plenty of legal hoops and bilingualism requirements to jump through, but Rare Drank usually just waits until "the government knocks on our door."

"I tend to [think] that most of the time if they come from a huge company like General Mills or something, it's most likely going to be good to eat, you know? But for sure, Health Canada [and other] organizations are navigating around what we do."

Bonnafé is quick to clarify, with a self-conscious smile, that he "never studied in food, manufacturing or stuff like that."

"I'm just a guy who likes snacks."