She’s a prominent businesswoman, a community volunteer and a military spouse. Valerie Hyska started working in the grocery store industry when she was in high school and 25-years-later owns now owns Hyska’s Your Independent Grocer in Petawawa. Valerie grew up in Southern Ontario and first came to Petawawa when her husband was posted here. She says they fell in love with the area and after being posted here three times decided to stay.
Hyska says owning a grocery store keeps her busy, but she still manages to find time to be the President of the Petawawa Rotary Club, chair of the Petawawa Business Advisory Network (PBAN) committee, sit on the board for the local housing corporation, be active with the food bank and helps create some great local events like the Pumpkin People Festival and Petawawa Ramble. When she’s not working or volunteering in the community, Valerie says she and her husband like to ATV, spend time outdoors taking in all that the area has to offer and she also enjoys yoga.
Valerie says she gained a lot of experience working closely with the Moncion family. She adds working for an independently owned grocery store gave her the opportunity to move around a lot and she gained lots of experience. One of the things she says she liked about independently owned grocery stores is that they’re more involved with the community. Hyska says she was around for the building of the new store and she feels the Moncion family were great mentors.
She says being a military spouse made it challenging to achieve her goal of owning a grocery store, but says with hard work and determination anything can happen. She started in the front end of the store, moved to the office, accounts payable, did some PR work, assisted in the floral business, department managing, all before the opportunity came up to buy the store in Petawawa.
Hyska says working for a company like Loblaws gave her the flexibility to be able to move around when her husband was posted. She says at one point in her career they were posted from Petawawa to Halifax and she went from managing a 30,000 square foot store to 120,000 square foot store. Valerie adds when her husband was posted overseas the company also gave her an extended leave from work.
The owner of Hyska’s Your Independent Grocer says there’s been lots of changes in the industry since she started. She says they’ve gone from less service to more service, to hitting food trends, bringing in plant based items, reducing packaging and now finding ways to keep customers safe throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Hyska says it’s been difficult for grocery stores as they were the ones setting the policies for the retail environment and stayed open when the health crisis hit in March. She says the changes were not day by day, but hour by hour. Hyska credits her experienced staff for taking the information, doing what they needed to do and executing policies immediately. She adds without a group like that it would have been much more difficult to manage.
Hyska says she’s not one to keep track of accomplishments, but one of the things she’s most proud of is being able to provide jobs for roughly 140 people in the community. She adds she does her best to make it a great work environment. Hyska says it was a lot of hard work to get to this point and adds she wasn’t going to let being a military spouse stop her from achieving her goals. She says if you stay focused and work hard anything can happen if you want to do it.
You can listen to part one of the interview here:
You can listen to part two of the interview here: