I got back from a trip through the BC interior a while back and I could not stop thinking about Kamloops.

Not because of the scenery, although yeah, it is beautiful. I kept thinking about the gap between what that city actually is and what the foodservice industry thinks it is. Most people in our business hear "Kamloops" and picture a highway pit stop between Vancouver and the Rockies. Maybe a Tim Hortons at a gas station. That is so far from reality it is almost funny.

Kamloops had 1.87 million visitors last year. Let that land for a second. A city of 113,000 people welcomed nearly 1.9 million visitors, and those visitors dropped $316 million in direct spending. That is a record. Not bad for a place most food industry executives could not find on a map without Google helping them out.

I just published the second city report in my series called The Other 95%. The concept is straightforward. I pick a Canadian city that the national foodservice media industry ignores, and I tear it apart. Demographics, tourism data, the restaurant scene, the delivery landscape, the marketing gaps, and the opportunities that are sitting right there waiting for somebody smart enough to grab them. The first report was Thunder Bay. This one is Kamloops.

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And Kamloops has layers I did not expect.

You probably did not know it is officially called Canada's Tournament Capital. Has been since 1984. They host over 100 sporting events and tournaments every single year. The 55+ BC Games are coming in 2026 with 2,500 participants and a $6 million impact. The Memorial Cup was there in 2023. Canada Soccer brings national tournaments through. That means thousands of athletes, coaches, parents, and fans rolling into town on any given weekend, all of them pulling out their phones and searching "where to eat near me." Most of them have never been to Kamloops before.

Then there is the mountain biking. Kamloops is where freeride mountain biking was born in Canada. That is not marketing spin, that is history. The Bike Ranch is the largest municipally owned bike park in the world. A study from 2024 put the economic impact of mountain biking in Kamloops at $18 million a year. Over 100,000 rider days per season. Forty thousand of those riders are visitors. And the average local rider drops $5,700 a year connected to the sport. Those people eat. Those people drink. And right now, most of the restaurants in Kamloops are not doing a single thing to position themselves in front of that crowd.

I also dug into something most people outside BC have never heard of. The Thompson Valley is now a legitimate wine region. Three wineries on the Kamloops Wine Trail, 120 acres under vine, cold-climate varietals that are genuinely good, and tour operators already running routes that include restaurant stops. Monte Creek just hit their 10th anniversary. This is not a hobby. And the cross-promotion between wineries and restaurants is barely getting started.

The report profiles specific restaurants. Brownstone, which operates out of a 1904 bank building where the poet Robert Service used to work. The Noble Pig, Kamloops' first microbrewery. Cordo Resto + Bar. Mittz Kitchen. I wanted to show what the food scene actually looks like on the ground, because until you know who is doing what, you cannot see where the white space is.

I got into the delivery situation too. Skip, DoorDash, and Uber Eats are all active, but there is a local outfit called Mitchie's Delivery that launched with lower commissions and is pulling restaurants away from the big platforms. One restaurant told me they raised prices 10 per cent on Skip and DoorDash but kept prices flat on Mitchie's. That tells you everything about where the tension is.

Thompson Rivers University puts 25,000 students into the market. International enrolment got hit hard, down 26 per cent, but domestic applications surged 34 per cent. The campus dining scene has not caught up to that shift yet. There is a gap there.

I covered Sun Peaks, 45 minutes up the road, Canada's second-largest ski area. Kamloops restaurants benefit from the overflow every winter and increasingly in summer too. I covered wildfire resilience, because if you operate in the BC interior and you do not have a plan for smoke season you are kidding yourself. And I spent time on the K'wseltkten Farmers' and Artisan Market, an Indigenous-owned market on Tk'emlups te Secwepemc territory that has grown from 7 tables to over 65.

The back half of the report is pure tactics. Social media strategy for the Kamloops market. Google Business Profile optimization. Local SEO keywords that visitors and residents are actually searching. And a full section on Generative Engine Optimization, which is a fancy way of saying how to get your restaurant recommended when someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI where to eat. That is not a future problem. One in five diners is already doing it. I built a 30-day action plan at the end so you can start this week.

If you operate in Kamloops, this is your market broken wide open. If you sell into the BC interior, this is your advantage over every other rep who shows up without doing homework. If you are anywhere in the Canadian food industry and you want to understand what opportunity looks like outside the big three cities, this is where you start.

The Other 95% exists because I spent 35 years watching this industry pour all its attention into Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal while the rest of the country got table scraps. I am done watching that happen.

The Other 95%: Kamloops, BC drops today on Amazon. Search NO|BS Reports and it will show up. Grab it before your competition does.