First skeptical of his mother-in-law’s home-brewed kombucha, it took Michael Doehle a week of drinking it to become a convert. And his mother-in-law’s passed-down SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) laid the foundation for VAMS Culture, the company he founded with his wife Vanessa Montemurro in their Parkdale home in 2010. VAMS, which stands for Vanessa and Michael, is now a line of distinct superfood-based kombuchas and eye-popping fluorescent-hued kefir waters. Kefir water uses a culture introduced to Doehle as Japanese water crystals, which he says resemble gummy bears.

It was half a century ago, but Pete Bradford still remembers walking into the cooler of his granfather's butchery and seeing two wooden barrels full of pig heads —only to exclaim, "Grandpa, that's what I'd like to do some day, make those barrels." But it wasn't until the closure of the General Motors plant Bradford managed in Trenton that he was able to head to Kansas to study how to make wine barrels full time. Now a master cooper, Bradford is one of ony a few left in the country.

The newly opened Drake Commissary is the fourth installment in the Drake enterprise and the one, chef Jonas Grupiljonas says brings the Drake back to its foundation. Housed in an old 8,000-squarefoot industrial building, the commissary is the Drake’s new bakeryrestaurant- bar-larder culinary hub that also serves as the production kitchen for its other locations. But for Grupiljonas, it’s a space to collaborate with his peers and put their philosophy of making everything from scratch to work.

One of the original Mennonite families to settle in the Waterloo region, the Martins have been farming their land since the 1820s. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that Leighton Martin, at the urging of an exchange student, planted his first 100 apple trees alongside his mixed vegetable gardens. Fast forward forty years and the Martin's Family Fruit Farm now harvests apples from more than 700 acres of orchards in southern Ontario. In 2012, the family took another leap of faith by jumping into the value-added market, building a fruit processing plant to produce their own line of apple chips.

It was only a matter of time before the years Christine Manning spent as a child in her Italian mother’s kitchen would influence her career. While on a break between marketing jobs, Manning and her husband James planted a vegetable garden and were rewarded with a bumper crop. Manning canned those vegetables, joined a farmers’ market and launched Manning Canning. When it was time to grow, Manning was faced with the challenge of finding adequate commercial kitchen space.