White Rye, and the Conestoga Gin –and two dark spirits – Whiskyjack Rye and the 1000 Islands Moonshine. The colour of each of them is natural because we’re organic – we don’t add anything. People don’t often realize that it is legal in Canada toadd caramel colour and not declare it on the bottle. Many of the big name dark spirits that people drink are the colour they are as a result of caramel colour and not the barrel. We can say without hesitation to people that what they’re drinking is 100 percent corn or rye and that the colouring comes from the wood when we age it. We age our spirits in used bourbon barrels – and we add-in oak chips. (We have about 3 000 litres aging right now..) “Knowing about the impact of local foods on your diet, your body, and the connection to your environment is a really big component for us.” And while I understand that you do online sales and ship within Ontario, I’m wondering how your relation- ship with the LCBO came to be? Last year the LCBO was getting so much push from local craft distillers to open up their process. There are more than 500 LCBO stores, I believe, and it’s the go-to for most Ontarians. For us, the local market is great, but it’s limited, it’s regional. Getting on the shelves at the LCBO is a must for any small distillery that wants to sustain its growth. The LCBO has sped-up the process quite a bit – it took us eight months as opposed to the year-plus wait of the past. We applied in late October last year and we got full-entry in late May. We more-or- less decided to go full-on. We went with four of our five products at the time – now we have six. There are limitations to the LCBO process. For instance, you can only submit four products. We can easily supply all six of our products, even if it’s by the pallet. But it’s still opened-up the market for us. We can now go from store to store and convince LCBOs throughout Ontario to list us. There certainly are a lot of proactive managers who want to feature locally-made products, especially certified organic ones. There are other managers who are a lot more conser- vative with their shelf space because they operate stores where selling huge volumes is the only thing that matters. We hope that the corporate powers that be start to guaran- tee Ontario craft distillers a certain amount of shelf space – we should have a footprint in those stores. We are building relationships with the employees, the staff, and the managers, but it’s a lot of work supplying individual stores
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • NOVEMBER 2017
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