Chilliwack farms more land than any other Lower Mainland community — about 67% of the city's 17,322-hectare land base is in agricultural use, and the city's 700-plus dairy, poultry and greenhouse/nursery operations contribute an estimated $700 million to the local economy, close to 29% of all economic activity here. Initiatives like the Chilliwack Farm Story project are pushing that sector toward agritourism and direct-to-consumer sales, but many farms are still trying to run tours, on-site sales and delivery on a phone number and a Facebook page instead of a website that can actually take a booking or a payment.
Downtown Chilliwack — the Yale Road and Young Road core — is home to more than 350 mostly locally owned businesses working through the multi-phase District 1881 redevelopment of the Young/Yale/Princess/Empress site. That's good news for the long-term health of the core, but construction disruption puts real pressure on foot-traffic-dependent shops, as well as businesses out in Central Village along Wellington Avenue and Mill Street and toward Sardis and Vedder Crossing, to keep online ordering, bookings and visibility strong while the physical street changes around them.
That same growth is reshaping Chilliwack's industrial base. More than 25 food and beverage processors already employ close to 600 people around Cattermole Industrial Estates and the Chilliwack Food and Beverage Processing Park, and the arrival of larger operators like Molson Coors is raising the bar on the logistics, scheduling and inventory systems that smaller processors, manufacturers and distributors need just to keep pace. With Cattermole alone offering more than 100 acres of industrial land, the businesses that get their back-office systems right now are the ones positioned to grow into that space.
Chilliwack's economy is growing at a stable rate of roughly 3% a year, and the city ranks in BC's top 10 for investment opportunity — which means fast permitting is also drawing new competitors and national chains into a market long served by small, independently branded operators. At the same time, rural and small-town BC businesses report more difficulty attracting skilled workers than their urban counterparts (54% versus 40%, per CFIB survey data), leaving many Chilliwack employers needing to automate manual scheduling, invoicing and back-office work rather than hire their way through it. That's where we come in.