MONTREAL – It's a new Montreal-based online company that had yet to ship out its first kosher bagel or mezuzah.

Yet Michael Green and Kamilya Karabeava were so confident that their new enterprise had the potential to flourish that they want the world to know.

Well, not exactly the world, just the 100,000 or so Jewish Canadians from the Maritimes westward they estimate live too remotely away from kosher foods and judaica to have access to them.

In late October, Green and Karabeava officially launched Montreal-based forloversoffood.com, which they billed as the very first Canadian website prepared to deliver just about all things kosher and Jewish from foodstuffs to menorahs - to anywhere in the country within shipping distance.

"It's an obvious idea, isn't it?" said Green, with whom Karabeava has spent the last eight months and upward of $50,000 getting their business up and running.

"There are a few such sites operating in the U.S., but this is the first one in Canada.

"There are many, many, many small Jewish communities out there - 25 Jewish families, 40 Jewish families - who don't want to drive from the Laurentians to Montreal, or two hours to Toronto or three hours from Calgary, for kosher things if they want them," Green said.

"They have no real access, so this is perfect for them."

Green, who is 70 and runs a corporate uniform business, has the title of For Lovers of Food's "sales consultant," while Karabeava, a 27-year-old colleague of Green's for the last eight years who has a Russian-Jewish and Asian background, is the official, "chief, cook and bottle-washer," he said.

"I've been cooking since I was nine," she said. "I have lots of friends in the catering and restaurant business."

Together, they have spent the last months meeting with and lining up suppliers, merchandise, warehouses, shippers, as well as launching the website.

"The hardest part was to integrate the sales with the shipping module (for the website)," Green said.

He and Karabeava said they have had a remarkable success rate - "100 per cent," Green claimed - in lining up the right participants because they have had the same positive reaction to their enterprise he and Karabeava got whenever they asked anybody about it.

One of the city's largest kosher bakeries, Montreal Kosher, will fill the orders for baked goods ranging from challahs (including frozen dough for baking) to cakes to blintzes, while the kosher food basket on the website now contains some 600 kosher items and counting, from gefilte fish to foie gras.

The branded kosher items include household names like U.S.-based Streit's and Rokeach, but also name brands not necessarily found on the aisle of the local supermarket, Green said.

Karabeava said the business also is prepared at a moment's notice to fill "specialty" orders, including freshly made kosher-catered meals that would be frozen and shipped.

Asked if they could fill a bar-mitzvah kosher catered reception order tomorrow, Green answered: "Without a doubt."

He and Karabeava said they are also in the concluding stages of negotiations with Costco Canada to have a link on its Canadian website to the For Lovers of Food site, for Canadian Costco clientele who want to order kosher items and judaica not carried by Costco.

"Everyone down the line has said it is a superb idea," Green said.

The judaica items in the site's "gift shop" - mostly imported from Israel - include tallitim, books, kiddush cups, challah trays and covers and dozens of other items.

Both Green and Karabeava seemed supremely optimistic about the prospects of their site catching on - so optimistic that they envision a string of warehouses one day existing across the country that would make shipping even more timely.

For the time being, deliveries within a 1,000-kilometre radius of Montreal are guaranteed within 24 hours and every effort has been made, Green said, to keep shipping costs to the client to a minimum. Every effort is also being made to ensure that deliveries are made before the onset of Shabbat.

"It's all very exciting," Karabeava said.