Here we will intro­duce you to the young, pas­sion­ate entre­pre­neurs behind some of the prod­ucts on our shelves. These are the peo­ple who are help­ing to shape the way we eat with their new and inno­v­a­tive products.

Mill Pond Cannery and Preserves Co.

Dave Smythe and Donna Carmichael, owners

It began with some obser­va­tions, then an idea…infused with a phi­los­o­phy, and firmly grounded in our own beliefs about the food we eat.  The increas­ingly com­plex and mys­te­ri­ous global food sys­tem was show­ing some fright­en­ing cracks and flaws.  The loss of her­itage vari­eties of fruit as a result of the increas­ingly ‘mono-culture’ prac­tices of large-scale con­tem­po­rary agri­cul­ture.  The increas­ing com­modi­ti­za­tion of our food.  The preva­lence of refined sugar in our diets, and the increas­ing use of high-fructose corn syrup in so many of the foods we eat…well, the list of obser­va­tions got pretty long.

The idea…why not eat prod­ucts that incor­po­rate what’s grown in our own lush and high-quality orchards and farms?  Why not sup­port Canadian farm­ers and grow­ers? Why not get back to the ‘orig­i­nal’ and nat­ural sweet­en­ers, such as honey and maple syrup?  And Mill Pond Cannery and Preserves Company was born…

Our all-natural prod­ucts include exclu­sively Ontario-grown pro­duce, pears, peaches, plums, and apples, tart ruby-red cran­ber­ries, and golden honey from Ontario api­aries.  Our fruit but­ter is based on an old recipe, handed down over the gen­er­a­tions.  It is time to rethink what we eat, where it is grown, and how it is made…close to home, close to per­fect.
Where did you start out in the food world?

About a year and a half ago we began to con­cep­tu­al­ize a new kind of food com­pany, with a focus on all-natural prod­ucts using 100% local ingre­di­ents.  Once we had artic­u­lated our vision and com­pany val­ues, we began to develop our prod­uct lines and recipes with a focus on Ontario fruit.

What inspires you to do what you do?

We are pas­sion­ate about using local ingre­di­ents, as well as using tra­di­tional recipes.  We looked through many old cook­books from the 1940’s and 1950’s, and saw that fruit but­ter was a main­stay in the ‘pre­serves’ sec­tions of these tra­di­tional cook­books.  The con­cept appealed to us tremen­dously, espe­cially in view of the bounty of won­der­ful fruit grown in Ontario.  We wanted to work with a top-notch culi­nary school (Centre for Hospitality and Culinary Arts depart­ment at George Brown College) to help us develop our recipes, with par­tic­u­lar empha­sis on includ­ing culi­nary stu­dents in the devel­op­ment process because we think that using local ingre­di­ents needs to be ingrained in young chefs dur­ing their train­ing, and shouldn’t be some­thing that they ‘come to’ later on in their careers.

Why make preserves?

Our Ontario cli­mate means that the grow­ing and har­vest­ing sea­son is,  of course, relatively short and in order to enjoy Ontario fruit all year long, the best option is to make pre­served prod­ucts that truly reveal the flavour of the fruit and not some over-sugared prod­uct.   Our fruit but­ters are intended to taste like a lus­cious ripe fruit, so we only use three sim­ple ingre­di­ents in our prod­ucts — fruit, with a small amount of honey and cider vine­gar, and then we add a touch of an inter­est­ing Canadian-grown herb.

What has been the biggest strug­gle or obsta­cle you’ve had to over­come in order to get your prod­uct onto shelves?

The biggest chal­lenge for us has been the post-harvest han­dling and pre-processing of the Ontario fruit.  The food sys­tem infra­struc­ture in Ontario has been sig­nif­i­cantly eroded over the last 20 years, as a result of tough global com­pe­ti­tion as well as con­sol­i­da­tion of small local proces­sors into larger con­glom­er­ates.  As a coun­try, we have lost much of our locally-based domes­tic food infra­struc­ture, and this poses a chal­lenge for com­pa­nies like ours who are com­mit­ted to pro­duc­ing truly local products.