We weren’t sure how, but we thought, the first thing to do is Google “business plan” and we went through the exer- cises in the template to put something together. Initially we thought maybe a local brewery would be our best bet, because we didn’t necessarily want to get into the wine business. We didn’t feel it would be wise to compete with my wife’s colleagues in the wine industry. And honestly, a winery wasn’t the way to go for us since they are capital intensive up-front and you only see returns after 10 or more years of operating. We have two small kids now, they’re 6 and 4 years old, and we wanted to feed them, so we started thinking about a brewery… while we were exploring that, we costed out making cider. Then I thought, wow, what an opportunity. There is an almost endless apple supply here, and here’s my wife working in the wine industry, there’s 6,000 acres of apple orchards nearby, and nobody in the local cider industry had a place you could visit, go into a tasting bar and have an explanation of how cider is made. We live in a small town called Wolfville, and when the brewery idea kind of faded, we decided to run with the cider idea. It was a lot more favourable to us for many reasons, one of which is that cider-making is essentially winemaking. It’s almost the same. You don’t brew a cider like you do a beer. You get juice, you ferment it… it was very comfortable for my wife, with her winemaking history. It’s a very ‘small-town- friendly’ attitude you portray. Is that by design or did that just happen organically? I think the key to our success so far is that we put a lot of homework into the plan.
Is the Annapolis Valley a particularly fertile apple growing country? Yeah, we have a very long history of growing apples in Nova Scotia that goes back several hundred years, arguably to when the French came over. The first Acadian settlers brought trees over from France, so we have a deeply entrenched industry, a sizeable industry — about 10% of Canada’s apple production comes out of Nova Scotia — so we certainly hit above our weight here, population-wise, in terms of production. And what became instantly evident is that we’ve got a tremendous diversity of varieties of apples compared to a lot of other regions. Part of my research is to preserve this bio-diversity. And you couldn’t be in a better place to do it than in Nova Scotia. “About 10% of Canada’s apple production comes out of Nova Scotia.” So the agriculture in the area combined with your passion as food and beverage lovers and your academic backgrounds converged to create this perfect marriage with the local food movement in Nova Scotia. Exactly. My wife and I were very passionate about the local food movement, we have always been very big support- ers and we felt that eventually we would like to not just be passive beneficiaries of the local food movement, but be active participants somehow.
It was really important for us to have this retail space, and to make sure that it isn’t disconnected from the production
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • DECEMBER 2017
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