On the first Tuesday of every month, we’ll announce a new Fearless Female, including a video interview of them sharing their business story. Want to be featured as a Fearless Female?
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To learn a little more about the Scotiabank Women Initiative, and why they’ve chosen to sponsor this program, see the video below.
The Fearless Female we’re featuring for the month of December is Sandra Hepditch, Co-Owner and CMO of Fo’Cheezy Food Trucks.
Sandra Hepditch owns a fleet of five award- winning Fo’Cheezy food trucks along with her partner, Sandor. After nearly 25 years in corporate marketing and business development she made the transition to her dream job as an entrepreneur. An education in English and experience in the service industry gave her the background to push the boundaries in this space over the past three years.
Sandra is candid about the challenges and rewards of her life as she shares what it’s like to make big life changes while surviving breast cancer and living with mental health issues. Her resilience and integrity drive her to give back to her surrounding community with a genuine generosity. All of this with a large dose of gratitude make Sandra our ideal December Fearless Female.
To learn more about Sandra’s journey as a Fearless Female, watch the interview below (or read the written format).
Tell us more about Fo’Cheezy
So, Fo’Cheezy has been around for around 13 years. I joined in 2023, and the work I do with Fo’Cheezy is really a jack of all trades, but what I love about it is that I get to do things that are interesting to me. So, I get to do all the HR, all the staffing, and the training. I look after some of the accounting, which I do not love.
I would rather spend money than track money, but I also get to do a lot of philanthropy. So, a big part of what we do is give money away to celebrate our success and to share with the community because it is important to us, and I get to choose where we put that money every year.
Can you tell us more about Fo’Cheezy’s background?
Sandor started Fo’Cheezy on his own. He bought the truck from a friend of his. He started working with this friend and then started Fo’Cheezy on his own. And he really is the success behind the menu, the company, and the way that it operates and its principles and values and all of those.
And then when I met Sandor in 2019, we started dating and we, of course, always talked about business. And I used to joke that he was stealing all my ideas. And since I met Sandor in 2019, we ended up increasing the number of trucks from one to five.
Yes, so in some ways we kind of have Fo’Cheezy part one and part two, which is the increase in the number of trucks and the staff and all that kind of stuff.
Tell us more about your career path
That is an interesting question. What inspired me to get into sales and marketing is that I have always been a storyteller. So, I took an English degree back in Halifax at St. Mary’s University, and I always loved stories and what motivates people. And I have always loved the heart of the matter of what goes into people’s happiness and things like that and been connected to people. So, from there, I got into insurance, and there is a lot of storytelling in marketing and in lifestyle insurance and telling people stories and protecting what you love and those kinds of things.
From there, I went into the technical side of things. So, website building and user experience, which I loved. And then I found out that I was a great writer. So I really, there’s lots of things I’m not good at, but I can write, which I like because it comes in handy when you’re doing all different kinds of things like social media, everything down to, from Instagram all the way through to writing blogs for LinkedIn.
How did all those experiences prepare you for leadership?
I learned about leadership at a young age because I always worked in service. So, I worked selling coffee, I worked delivering newspapers. I have always worked; I worked as a babysitter. Then I worked as a camp counselor and a staff director at a camp. And I learned a lot about leadership and leading through example by leading other people.
I was naturally drawn to leadership. From there, I have always just raised my hand when it became opportunities. I like to take risks, and I am a little bit bossy and a little bit opinionated. So, it made it easy to take leadership roles. I think that the biggest call for me to leadership is the inspiration and just the value I get out of seeing other people succeed. I really see other people’s success as my own success.
Tell us about some of the highlights in your career so far
This is a tough one because I don’t really collect awards per se. I am looking more at how my team does. So, I have worked with a number of teams where we have been nominated for CEO Awards of Excellence in the retirement space when I worked in insurance.
I worked with teams who delivered beautiful websites on time or advisors’ tools that we used in the financial industry. And I think from there, I took that out to Fo’Cheezy in a way that I wanted us to be recognized for what we were doing. So, when we were so honored to be nominated for awards with the Chamber, I really put my heart and soul into that into sharing our story and what sets us apart. And not because we wanted to win Employer of the Year or Small Business of the Year, but also because we wanted our staff to be recognized for what they do. We really put staff first because if we put our staff first then our customers come first.
How did you and Sandor feel about winning the Employer of the Year Award at the 2025 Chamber’s Small Business Awards
I think for Sandor, it was a very emotional reward for him. He has put his heart and soul into Fo’Cheezy. I was lucky to join it while the bus was already moving if you will. But for him, he has put his heart and soul into it. He has run cafes; he has worked at Fo’Cheezy 364 days a year. He is tried and failed and all those different things. And that is all part of it.
But he felt a certain pride when the community recognized that Fo’Cheezy is a leader in space. And I think for me, it felt like a good coming home, because it was very easy for me to write about why Fo’Cheezy was a great business, because I did not start the business. If I had to write about why Fo’Cheezy is a great business from my own perspective, it is easy, but not about myself per se.
What are some of the challenges that you have faced so far?
Some of the challenges I face as a business leader are that I do not always like to follow rules. I do not color inside the lines. All those cliches, the square peg in a round hole. Working for corporate was difficult for me. I did not always want to have a boss.
So, running my own company is perfectly ideal with Sandor as a partner, because we’re both really strong in our own sets of skills, and we can kind of stay in our own lane and do what works. And we got that as advice from other couples who run their own businesses together. Other challenges I face as a leader, aside from having a hard time following orders from other people, are just learning quickly enough. That makes it difficult sometimes, especially when you run your own business. You must learn about bylaws. You must learn about accounting. You must learn how do you deal with difficult staff members. How do you scale and grow? So, we are hoping to have a franchise soon. That is a whole different world for me that we are stepping into a new space. So, we have to learn all the legal aspects of that.
And while it is exciting and it’s easy to learn because you are consuming all of this information at a rapid pace. So that can be a challenge.
Can you tell us more about franchising?
We are such a franchise as of May this year, and we are expanding our territory with this franchise. I can tell you the person is someone who we know and absolutely adore, who has been working with Sandor for over 12 years. So, she knows Fo’Cheezy inside and out, and she is a good food trucker. So, it will be great to see her do her thing.
We will support her in the business side, but she has all the passion all looked after. So, we are really excited about where she’s going to take it.
If you could go back in time, is there anything you’d do differently?
If I was going to do things differently in my career, I would have stopped running at the corporate wall. I really tried to be a corporate person for years and years. And I think that trying to be a corporate person for somebody with my personality and character is difficult. I find that when I can manage my own hours and do my own things, it’s much easier.
So, I’m open about the fact that I have bipolar disorder, which means that I have good days and bad days. And working at a desk job nine to five, because working remotely was not an option necessarily when I was in corporate, can be very difficult. When you have a bad day and you have to go to the office, you have got a mask, you’ve got to push down what you’re feeling and that kind of stuff.
Now I can have a bad day, work from home, get things done. And as soon as I’m feeling better, I can jump back into things.
How is your mental health journey going now?
Things are great.
I mean, when you have bipolar disorder, you kind of have the choice to manage it in your own way with sleep and diet and those things. So, I do a combination of both. And for the most part, it’s good.
I definitely still have bad days. I think a lot of people, if they’re honest about their mental health, have bad days from time to time. I think we’re living in tough times and it’s hard to always be up and perfect and going.
It’s something that I am open about because I think people, it disarms them and it opens them up and it allows them to be human in their own experience and their lived experiences with me. So even when it comes to my staff, for example, when they have bad days or if someone’s suffering from depression or is wondering what they’re going to do with their life, because not everyone who works with us is working obviously on a food truck for the rest of their lives. So they’re coming up against some tough questions.
It makes me more compassionate. It makes me more empathetic, understanding, and approachable, I think.
What methods and strategies have you used to grow your business?
That’s a great question for me because I always look at what I’m doing as part of a greater community of expertise.
So, what I try to do is lean on the right people, lean on the experts and then get out of their way and let them do the thing at which they are best. So, we get help with our social media from somebody who loves food and does a beautiful job. We lean on organizations like the Chamber and mentors and even people like Lisa (Lisa McDonald, Sales Rep for the KW Chamber), who are there with all the next opportunities.
They see things that we do not necessarily see because we are heads down in work. So that has helped me both personally and professionally. I think that the Chamber has helped us professionally be seen more as an actual company, as an organization that is offering value as opposed to just a one-off food truck that nobody is really paying attention to.
But the truth is that food trucks are a real thing. They are huge and they are happening. And in other cities, they are everywhere. There are food truck parks. It’s kind of the golden age of food trucks and the food is fantastic. It is a lot of mom-and-pop shops.
So, you are really supporting locals when you’re supporting food trucks. So, it’s nice to see that we’ve gotten help from the Chamber and other groups.
How do you define success?
Personally, I define success by seeing how I’m impacting others. It’s really that simple for me. If I’m not leaving the world a better place than when I started, I’m not interested in that success. Sandor and I are on a good balance because he is a very balanced person in terms of growth and financial and those kinds of things.
He’s very driven to be successful and be sustainable. And for me, I like to be a little bit on the softer side and look at things like how we are impacting the community, the lives of our people who work for us and those kinds of things. And that’s why we’ve done things like introducing benefits to our staff who’ve never had access to benefits before a lot of them.
We support their mental health in many ways through counseling and professional development and other things like that. And we know we’re successful at the end of the day because we have a good team that’s like a family and they stick together even outside of work. And that makes us really happy.
What core values have you integrated into Fo’Cheezy?
The core values that guide me as a leader are really around honesty and integrity. I think it is important for us, especially in times like these and as business owners, to be honest with each other, with the customer, with the staff, with the team itself and that integrity. So, for example, we may get asked to do what we call a gig and something better may come along shortly after.
We will always stick with the first thing we were asked to do. And if we gave our word, we will be there. That is a huge thing for us. It’s not always the easiest thing. It’s not always the best thing in terms of our financials down the road, but our integrity ensures that if we say we are going to be somewhere and we are going to do something, we do it. And we ask the same of our staff.
Tell us about your breast cancer survival journey
One interesting thing about me that I’m also very open about is that I am a breast cancer survivor. I was diagnosed when I was in university at 29 years old, which was quite devastating at the time. I was a single woman living in Halifax and I was surprised to say the least, but it’s been in its own strange way, a gift because it has taught me resilience. And it’s also taught me that sometimes you do not need to learn some of the hard lessons. Life is hard enough. You don’t need to get cancer to learn those lessons, but it’s helped me understand other people and helps them see light through their own illness.
I think a lot of us are living with different things and carrying different weight. And it’s really, it’s been one of the gifts of my life in an odd way.
What strategies do you use to recruit talent and build teams?
For us, building a strong team means investing in people early and often. And we invest in them by getting them their first aid qualifications. We invest in them by training them extensively, cross-training them. We like to see them work with us over a period of years.
So, for example, we will invest in someone who’s a high school student and has never had a job and they’ll learn how to do different things on the truck. So, they’ll learn customer service. They’ll learn team management, team playing, and how to clean. They’ll learn all these different things and then they’ll learn first aid. They’ll eventually learn how to drive the truck if they want to, those kinds of things. We have helped people financially.
We’ve helped people on our team, got off to school and came back and supported them in their hours and that kind of stuff.
Does Fo’Cheezy set up shop anywhere?
Fo’Cheezy doesn’t set up shop anywhere. What we do is operate mobile 100%. So, we do a lot of corporate stuff for the winter. We do some Christmas markets at this time of year and maybe a couple of times we’ll go to a few of the food truck spots that are set aside specifically for us by the train station in Waterloo, for example, or there’s one just over here on Auto Street. So, that we may set up as a very ad hoc pop-up sort of situation.
But our drivers are amazing. Our staff are amazing in the way that they can drive the food truck and get through different weather situations. One of our favorite customers is in Listowel. And so sometimes we drive there in the snow with this giant food truck, which is like a wind tunnel, causes like a wind tunnel on the highway. It can be quite something. We drive to different areas with the food trucks, but mostly we stay within the region.
What are some of the advantages of setting up your business in Waterloo Region?
To me, the advantages of working and leading in Waterloo region are really about the amazing economy, the diversity of the population. We love being a part of all the festivals and the cultural events that go on. We love the student population.
That is fantastic for us. We are at college, at universities. It gives us access to an influx of clients where we would not necessarily have. So, we will be at the university in the winter where we would sort of be sitting at home quietly because the students are still coming out. Or does it give us access to staff during a time when we really need them, which is in the summertime, right? From mid-April to the end of September. So, for us, Waterloo Region is our home. It’s where we both grew up. We both went away and did other things, came back and just found our place again. And because the area is growing and it’s so interesting a place to be, we are excited to be here and raise our family here.
What inspires you?
I think I’m inspired by my family in so many ways because they are probably at the crux of everything that I do. Fo’Cheezy family is inspiring to me. My more intimate family and family that I’ve sort of created through friends and other things also inspire me.
I have three great kids. So, I have two boys, one eleven and one 13. And then I just had a baby this summer. So, she is three months old. And really, it is about seeing who they’re going to be and how positively they’re going to impact the world. Sandor is my second marriage. And I really believe getting married and having children is an act of hope. So, it is an easy time to be negative about the world and feel like things are not going to work out, but we choose to hope, and we sort of stay inspired by that. I must tell you; it is very easy to feel giddy about grilled cheese.
Like if you are serving grilled cheese, you’re serving people at a time when they’re with their families and those are our number one customers is family. So, we like to sort of stay focused on that.
What advice would you give to other women who are aspiring to get into a leadership role, or start a business?
I think for women, it’s hard because you’re told that you have to be a people pleaser. It is not popular to be terribly articulate or assertive. And I think, especially in the food space, it can still be that Chef Ramsay, old school kitchen mentality. So, my advice for people who want to do something like food trucking, for example, is to really stick with it and have confidence and lean on other people.
So, some of my favorite food truckers are strong women and they’re leading the way by running their own businesses on their own and really breaking the mold.
Other industries other than food trucking, my advice to women is really to stick together, to lean on each other, to use the resources on LinkedIn and in mentorship groups that are available to you, be in spaces where it’s safe to be a woman and to hear from other women what it’s like. I think to have your friend group is really important. That will, you know, your ride or die. I think you can have those in business as well. Someone who will tell you and hold you accountable if you need to check yourself or try taking another risk and it’s okay, they are there if you fail.
The queen fixing your crown, as it were. I think that is really important to find those people because positions of leadership can be very lonely. Positions of leadership can be a space, especially as a woman where if you are leading diverse teams, you can make unpopular decisions and you can go home at the end of the day depleted and second guessing yourself.
But if you have that crowd who will support you and say, you know, you’ve done the right thing and even when you haven’t done the right thing, I see where you were coming from, try again tomorrow, it’s okay. Those things are important to have women in your space.
What are your future goals and aspirations?
Our goals and aspirations for Fo’Cheeezy and for my career are really about seeing other people have the opportunity to work for themselves.
I think that giving people a leg up by working with them to franchise as opposed to other franchises where the price of admission is so high and so difficult. Because we are the type of people we are, we’re supportive. Sandor helps other food truckers all the time, whether it be somebody needs to borrow something or somebody’s having a technical problem, wants to know about a festival, should they go, how their square point of sale system could work, all of that kind of stuff.
We support our whole community. So, I’d like to see us do that franchise opportunity where we can help people who are small business owners really have the opportunity to get out there and not work for somebody else.
Another key area that we’re hoping to work on this year is to expand our geography and geographical impact. So right now, we really are in the Kitchener-Waterloo region, some Guelph, some Cambridge, a little bit in Woodstock, but we like to further out what we’re doing. And that is really for us, spreading out on a geographic front is really about sustainability. So, if it is slower sometimes in July and August, September/May and June are our busiest months.
So, in July and August, what we have been doing is driving out to Lake Huron, Port Elgin, Southampton, and some of those places and getting to know there at their festivals, which are great. And with everyone staying in Ontario more this summer than ever, we found that we had great success by just making a little bit of a further drive.
Where can viewers find out more about you and your business?
I am always available for a coffee or a glass of wine, and you can just reach me through Focheezy.ca. And I’m also on LinkedIn. I love to help people do things that take a step towards their dreams. I have also worked with people who make transitions in life, going from say corporate to a food truck was a huge step, right? So, I have a friend recently who just lost his job and what I have done is tried to help him and coach him on how to rethink his own personal brand so that he can get hired outside of his scope.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
