Toonie Bar Profit and Special Occasion Permit in Ontario

Someone suggested to us instead of saying its a toonie bar instead put a jar at your head table that says like wedding fund or honey mood fund and then you can just use that money towards costs

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You can, but then they'd be stuck behind the bar all night instead of being able to party with you.

View quoted message Hello Hank,


Thank you for this. We could however get a family or friend to serve alcohol as long as they have a smart serve right?

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If the venue does not serve alcohol, you just need the private for sale SOP as I mentioned. You have to get your alcohol through the LCBO though. You can't serve homemade wine or anything like that.

If you don't go through the caterer, you still need a dedicated licensed server to work the whole event though. You can't just have a family or friend free pour or grab whatever they want like they would at a house party.

I also highly suggest you get alcohol liability insurance on top of that.

View quoted message So because with a wedding event, you can "expense" items that would ultimately affect your "bottom line/profit", such as wedding dress, etc. So on paper, you don't actually technically profit from the alcohol because of all these other expenses in your wedding budget that are factoring in. Just like you can use the "expense" of the cost it takes to actually purchase the alcohol from the lcbo

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I am not sure I understand! However if this makes it easier, the venue that we are holding it at does not offer bar service/alcohol. So we could either hire our caterer to also provide bartenders and supply alcohol, or we have the option of getting a SOP, purchasing our own alcohol, and getting family/friends to be bartenders.

So the way our venue (a community hall/centre) phrased it to us is that you can "expense" things for your event (dress, vendors, etc) and although you technically could profit off a toonie bar, in the "grand scheme of things" after all your other expenses you are 99.99% of the time not going to actually "profit" on paper. And that's why most buck and doe's no longer occur at these venues because you don't have the same "expenses" at those that you would be able to list for a wedding, if that makes sense??

You can profit off alcohol but the SOP is more expensive. You're looking for a "Private Event Sale SOP." It's $150 vs $50 for a non-sale SOP.

The thing is though, does your venue allow it? Most venues with their own alcohol supply won't allow external alcohol sources brought in and they certainly won't let you profit off of their alcohol.