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. 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,
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • OCTOBER 2017
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