D&D Poultry’s 30-Year History: How a Family Built Ontario’s Most Trusted Chicken Brand

Every business has a founding story. D&D Poultry’s is one of the better ones.

The Beginning

Kostas and Anastasia Dikeos came to Canada from Greece. They came, as so many immigrant families do, looking for the chance to build something of their own in a place that rewards hard work. They chose chicken. They chose Toronto. And they built D&D Poultry — first as a small operation, then steadily growing into one of Ontario’s most trusted poultry processors.

The foundation was straightforward: make food you’d serve to your own family. Keep quality high. Don’t cut corners. Build relationships — with farms, with restaurant owners, with the community — that last decades.

Building a Name Without a Name on the Label

For most of D&D Poultry’s first decades, the company operated without a public-facing consumer brand. The work was in food service and wholesale — supplying restaurants, banquet halls, and institutional kitchens across Ontario, and white label manufacturing for some of the province’s most recognized grocery brands. Longo’s. Mark McEwan’s. The chicken behind labels you’d recognize immediately.

The Dikeos family was content with this. They were building a reputation on the quality of the product, not the visibility of the name. In an industry where word-of-mouth from a chef or a purchasing manager is worth more than any advertisement, that strategy worked.

The Second Generation — Running the Business

All four of Kostas and Anastasia’s children now hold senior leadership positions. Betty serves as Vice President of Sales and Marketing, bringing strategic direction to how D&D grows its relationships with restaurants, retailers, and grocery buyers. Alex manages projects and operational initiatives as Project Manager. Georgia oversees the numbers as Finance Manager. Bobby keeps production running smoothly as Production Coordinator. Every major function of the business — sales, operations, finance, production — is led by a member of the Dikeos family.

They learned how it worked from the inside, then took ownership of it. Under their leadership D&D expanded its product line, built its food service customer base across Ontario, earned HACCP certification in 2006, and developed the full Glacial Treasure product range.

The Third Generation — Growing Up in It

Five grandchildren of Kostas and Anastasia now work across every corner of the operation alongside their parents. You’ll find them in the office handling admin and database systems, out in the warehouse picking orders and moving product, on delivery runs across the GTA, and staffing the retail Cash & Carry on weekends. Customers who come in on Saturdays often remark on seeing three generations of the same family at work. It’s unusual. It’s also the whole point.

Glacial Treasure — Finally the Family’s Own Name on the Shelf

Glacial Treasure arriving at Fortinos this June is the culmination of everything the first generation built. For thirty years, this family made some of the best chicken products in Ontario without putting their name on them. The souvlaki behind restaurant menus. The chicken breast in grocery store packaging. The stuffed chicken that made banquet halls look good.

Now it’s Glacial Treasure. It’s their name. It’s long overdue. And the homemade Tzatziki and Tirokafteri — made from Anastasia Dikeos’s original Greek recipes, available at the Cash & Carry since the beginning — have been there all along, waiting for the rest of the story to catch up.

The latest chapter — Glacial Treasure at Fortinos this June — ddpoultry.ca/glacial-treasure/