Left to right: Mark Ysseldyk, his wife Angela and her father John Van Alten at the original flagship Dutchman’s Gold store from the 1980s that still operates in Carlisle, Ont.Kenneth Chou
Long before honey was positioned as a “functional food” with health benefits by the multitrillion-dollar global wellness industry, John Van Alten and his family saw the potential of unpasteurized, natural bee products.
In 1980, he and his wife at the time were Canadian nomads travelling across North America in a red van seeking a place to settle. They landed in Carlisle, Ont., a Hamilton community 75 kilometres southwest of Toronto. “A gentleman just happened to be selling 300 beehives,” says their oldest daughter Angela Ysseldyk, who was two years old at the time.
Her mother was a proponent of apitherapy – using bee products for healthy living – and there was a house for rent across from the bee yard. The family moved in and bought the hives even though Mr. Van Alten had zero beekeeping skills.
“Being young and not really having any clear direction, I thought it sounded like a great idea,” says Mr. Van Alten, now 70, though he adds that it was a “steep learning curve.”
Within a year the family was selling honey, homemade granola, fresh bread and jam off their front porch. “The first couple of years were quite tough. We didn’t really get big honey crops,” Mr. Van Alten recalls. To shore up supply, he bought honey from local beekeepers and sold it under the name Dutchman’s Gold – a nod to the family’s ancestry.
Building a multigenerational family business wasn’t the goal at the time, but Ms. Ysseldyk, who now owns the company with her husband Mark Ysseldyk, 47, was raised in a culture of environmental sustainability and natural living. She and her four siblings grew up crafting tinctures and candles with their mom in the family kitchen. A sign on the porch read, “Take your honey and leave your money,” signalling the trust on which this purpose-driven family enterprise was built.
Dutchman’s quickly outgrew the front stoop, selling its products throughout the 1980s at the Guelph Farmers’ Market, followed by the Longo’s grocery chain and Goodness Me! health-food stores. “By the 1990s, we knew we were onto something that we could sustain ourselves with,” Mr. Van Alten says.
Today, the Dutchman’s Gold flagship store, some hives and candle production remain in Carlisle, while honey and bee-pollen manufacturing, customer-service divisions and order processing are in nearby Puslinch.
The company buys honey from eight to 10 beekeepers in Ontario, as well as from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and employs 16 full-time and 15 part-time workers. It also sells supplements including bee-pollen capsules and granules, used to support nutrition and energy, and propolis capsules, often taken for immune support. Ninety-eight per cent of sales are within Canada.
What started as a front-porch enterprise has grown into a honey and bee-pollen manufacturing business that employs 16 full-time and 15 part-time workers and ships products across the country.Kenneth Chou
As an early producer of natural bee products, Dutchman’s was ideally positioned to capitalize on its decades-long expertise when the idea of honey and beeswax as wellness products became mainstream, says Matt MacDonald, national leader of the food and beverage processing practice at countrywide advisory services firm MNP.
According to industry organization Global Wellness Institute, the worldwide wellness category has doubled since 2013 to $8.5-trillion last year.
“They’re fortunate in the sense that they obviously believed in the honey and the wellness before it was a trend,” Mr. MacDonald says. The company’s expansion from local to national markets “proves you can have a successful, family-owned business that can scale in Canada.”
Being attuned to another emerging market – e-commerce – was what turned Dutchman’s into a second-generation family enterprise. The company had had requests to ship orders across Canada and the United States, so Ms. Ysseldyk, who in 2009 was on maternity leave from a corporate job in the nutraceutical and supplement industry, worked with her husband to build a website to sell Dutchman’s products online as a side hustle.
“It really gave me a sense of the broader potential of Dutchman’s Gold,” says Mr. Ysseldyk, who at the time owned five health-food stores in Ontario. He sold his shops in 2014 to concentrate on the website, which grew to $1-million in sales the next year and which Dutchman’s later absorbed.
By 2016, Mr. Van Alten was looking to wind down, so his son-in-law learned the day-to-day operations and developed a transition plan over many conversations. The Ysseldyks worked with a lawyer and an accountant to create a purchase agreement two years later and Mr. Van Alten signed over the company.
The whole family accepted transfer: “We were the only ones who put our hands up,” Ms. Ysseldyk says of her siblings’ lack of interest in running the business. (Her mother sold her stake when she and Mr. Van Alten divorced.) In 2023, Ms. Ysseldyk came on board full-time to focus on sales and marketing after being restructured out of her corporate job.
Online sales make up a substantial portion of Dutchman’s Gold’s revenue from honey and supplements including bee-pollen granules and propolis capsules.Kenneth Chou
The couple’s work to meet burgeoning nationwide demand by expanding outreach and production is paying off: overall sales have nearly doubled since their purchase, with online revenues playing a significant role. Last year showed strong traction as Canadians increasingly chose local, family-owned brands amid trade tensions with the United States.
But there have been challenges. Closure of borders to international travellers in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic slashed honey production because beekeepers couldn’t hire the foreign workers on whom they depended to help winterize hives and overwinter the bees. Honey suppliers doubled their prices. “It caused us to have to ship products for about a year at a loss,” Mr. Ysseldyk says.
Dutchman’s has now rebounded, with a goal to build slowly and sustainably throughout Canada in bricks-and-mortar stores such as Whole Foods, Metro, Farm Boy and Sobeys, and through online retailers including Costco.ca and Amazon.
Mr. Van Alten is happy to let the second generation lead, though he still helps unload trucks, run a forklift or plow snow. “They have grown the business substantially,” he says. “They’ve brought it up to a level that I never could have.”
Have a suggestion of a Canadian multigenerational family business for this regular series? E-mail smallbiz@globeandmail.com.