With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1365499
W I N N E R JILL VAN GYN C E O , F A T S O N U T B U T T E R S JILL VAN GYN RETURNED to her home- town of Victoria in 2015 with few prospects. After earning an MA in human security and peacebuilding from Royal Roads University, she'd spent six months doing research in Uganda, with plans to pursue a career in international development. At 35, she found herself jobless for a year and a half. "Noth- ing in my life was working," Van Gyn recalls. That soon changed. Helping manage a health food restaurant to pay the bills, Van Gyn became obsessed with a local peanut butter brand called Fatso. The owners spurned her offers to get involved—until health authorities learned that they lacked permits and seized their basement-made inventory. Buying Fatso in 2016 "for about the price of a used car," Van Gyn set out to grow it, with no experience. "I was just crazy enough at that point to be like, Well, I guess I'm going to make peanut butter." Van Gyn, who started doing that messy job herself in the back of the restaurant, soon found a local co-packer. She also launched a two-year publicity campaign, driving up and down Vancouver Island every weekend to deliver Fatso to stores and demo it for shoppers. "It seemed to have this snowball effect," she recalls. The CrossFit devotee optimized Fatso for nutrition and sale, too. Working with a nutritionist, Van Gyn added other plant- based fats such as coconut oil, chia seeds and flax. She also saw a gap in the nut butter market, which consisted of low-cost peanut butter and expensive specialty offerings. "There was nothing in between that had nutritional density, ingredient diversity and was also accessible to a lot more people," says Van Gyn, who now has her mid-priced product manufactured in New Brunswick. Today, Fatso sells its peanut butter and new almond-and-seed butter nationwide—at smaller retailers and at major chains such as Loblaws, Sobeys and Whole Foods Market— and in Washington and Oregon. Next up for the four-member team: California. From the start, Fatso has balanced purpose with profit. Van Gyn, who entered recovery from drug and alcohol addiction in 2010, says she supports underfunded and underserved causes that other businesses often shun. For example, she sits on the board of Peers Victoria Resources Society, an advocacy group for sex workers. Fatso, which recently became a B Corporation, has also stepped up during COVID. Last year, it donated $200,000 in product and money to food banks and communities here and in the U.S. "I was like, We're not a peanut butter company right now; we're a food security orga- nization," Van Gyn says. The company uses its social media clout to help others be heard, she notes. "We have a business that has a loud voice in the market and the com- munity, and if we can lend that out, we will. It feels like our responsibility." MAY 2021 BCBUSINESS 19 ENTREPRENEURIAL LE ADER R U N N E R - U P MADELEINE SHAW C O - F O U N D E R , A I S L E ; F O U N D E R + C H I E F C O M M U N I T Y O F F I C E R , N E S T W O R K S W O R K P L A C E S O C I E T Y WHEN MADELEINE SHAW and her business partner, Suzanne Siemens, had children in the early 2000s, they weren't eligible for maternity leave. "So we brought our kids to work with us, which at the time was a very radical act," Shaw says of their five-year solution. "It showed me that there was this false dichotomy between work and family." The two kept building what's now called Aisle, a Vancouver- based maker of reusable period products that Shaw launched in 1993. The B Corporation, which sells in 40 countries, employs 12 people in its hometown. Compared to a disposable, each Aisle product diverts 99 percent of waste from the landfill. The company has donated its pads, cups and underwear to 30,000 girls in 17 nations. Shaw and Siemens also mentored Afripads, a Uganda-based startup inspired by Aisle whose products have reached 3.5 million girls. After both businesses collabo- rated on a booklet about menstrual health, it became a full curriculum that NGOs have used to educate more than 110,000 girls and women. Nestworks, Shaw's new ven- ture, plans to open family-friendly spaces throughout the Lower Main- land that offer flexible child care and somewhere outside the home to work. "Our business case is so much sharper now," says the Vancouver native, whose team is preparing to pitch investors. "We've got an entire she-cession to address, and people are finally paying attention to the child-care crisis." –N.R. TOP: NIK WEST