President's Choice Holiday PopUp

President's Choice has created something really new and fun for a large grocery retailer.  They created a Holiday Environment Pop Up on King Street West at Blue Jays Way.The really great part is that it runs for a couple of weeks before Christmas and it's totally FREE to check out and to sample bites of their special holiday PC food items.It's closed on mondays but open until 7 most nights and there are also special events there in the evenings that you have to sign up for.  I stopped by after I attended another event to check it out.  When I got there I was immediately drawn to the Nutcracker's in the window display.  It's located on the corner of the block in a pretty large space.  There is a red carpet style entrance and when you walk in you are asked to sit on a large bench while they organize a certain amount of people for the tour.  It takes about 20 to 30 minutes to go through it in groups of about 8 I think.  The entrance is beautifully decorated in holiday decor and then when you walk in you are brought to 4 different rooms.  The first room we entered had a moving train set up that moved through the town space and had places of food samples as the cargo.  It was so cool and impressive.  We sampled the cherry chocolate cake and the waffles with cookie butter and bacon maple syrup. We were then let into the Mingle room where it was decorated in greens and lighted acrylic trees displaying the dishes.  The appetizers where from the Thai appetizer collection and we also sampled some Gochichang chicken wings, butter chicken poutine and 3 of the different Thai appetizers which were all very good.

The next room was the Dinner room where we sampled a beet pasta, a piece of country ham, brussel sprouts and a potato stack.  Then we had the vanilla bean cheesecake with raspberry sauce.  We were pretty full by this time.  The last room was the Gift Room.  I thought this room was really cute with wall to wall colored boxes and were given the choice of their chocolate covered popcorn in a little clear box and another sweet treat but I can't remember what it was unfortunately.

The space is gorgeous and the fact that they sample all of these products at one time to showcase how you can entertain for the season is a great idea.   You can't purchase the foods at the pop up space but they will tell you where you can get them near you if you ask.  

I would totally recommend checking it out while you can just to see how cool the space is even. You can get great decor tips from this space and I would love to see other big retailers do something like this for the holidays.  It's fun and I know it's all marketing and meant to drive sales but it's a fun thing to do.  Be prepared as I heard that there are lineups sometimes and I am sure there will be more as people hear about it being there.  Go hungry and enjoy.

This is not a sponsored post.  I went on my own and the opinions expressed are my own.