“My father was a chef so I have kitchen experience, but I’m actually a mechanic by trade. I was an automotive mechanic for a number of years. I eventually moved into the customer service side of things because I love working and interact- ing with people, the public. I met Heather in the automo- tive industry in Alberta – she’s actually from there. We have the administration side of that industry in common. We’re both experienced at managing people and interacting with customers. From there, I took a job in banking until the opportunity came up to return to Nova Scotia.” “We really need to understand the look, the feel, the smell, the taste of properly tempered chocolate.” I was curious as to why Michael and Heather had the, as he put it earlier, “energy and enthusiasm” to leave reputable careers. Heather’s response was a homerun. “We realized we needed to find more than a job. What we wanted was a lifestyle where the people you interact with are happy; you make them happy. Nobody wants to fix their car; nobody wants to go to the bank, so you gener- ally get the hard edge of people in those industries. Now, making chocolate, you see everyone come through the door with a smile on their face.”
Bentley’s Maple was started in the early 1980s by Avard and Jean Bentley on their 720 acre sugar bush located in Westchester Mountain. Today the opera- tion is run by Avard, Jean and their son Michael. It was started with a few hundred taps and has grown to over 45,000 taps. We used to boil the sap down over wooden chips, as new technologies emerged we switched to oil fired burners. Our camp has also evolved over the years. It started out as a one room shanty. Today it is a state of the art facility. We have our boiling and storage building as well as a living quarters building. It the beginning it would take days to tap the trees by hand. Today with modern drilling equipment we can tap all our trees in about 2 weeks. If you were to see our pipeline system you would think there was a maze of wire and pipe as our sap travels from the trees to the holding tanks by this elaborate pipeline system using gravity and vacuum pumps. We produce maple syrup, maple cream, maple butter, maple sugar and maple candy. During the active season we also make snow candy at the camp for our visitors.
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OCTOBER 2016 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS
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