It all started in the Pusic family kitchen almost two years ago: motivated by a love of ice cream, created using a Kitchen Aid mixer and quality controlled by two young and willing taste testers.
And so Guelph's Bluewater Creamery was born, a small-batch ice cream business specializing in fresh local ingredients and original flavours.
John and wife Lily Pusic managed to build themselves a super-cool little niche business, selling their high quality product via mobile carts at places like the Aberfoyle Antique Market, St. Jacob's Farmers' Market, Guelph Farmers' Market and downtown Guelph Noon Hour Concert series.
You don't find flavours like salted caramelized honeycomb, rhubarb strawberry crisp, farmer's market breakfast and stout chocolate brownie and pretzel in the frozen food section of your grocery store.
Things were going well, until the day a government inspector walked into the St. Jacob's Farmers' Market and delivered the bad news.
While you can make and sell a dairy product at the same location, making a dairy product in one place and selling it in another violated the 50-year-old Dairy Act, they were told. Create a commercial dairy, get a licence and you were okay. If not, stop selling ice cream.
"They said 'you need to be a dairy to be a distributor,'" John said. "To get the dairy licence is $150 a year, which isn't much, but to meet the criteria to be a dairy is hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment into a facility deemed safe for the public."
The Pusics were stunned. They make their ice cream in a leased commercial kitchen and have passed all Public Health inspections with flying colours.
But rules are rules, and for now the only product they can sell is non-dairy ice cream.
"It was devastating. A shock," Lili said of the news.
"This business started with a little seed of a thought and it grew into something special to us and they stomped all over it."
But the Pusics, including kids Jani and Alina, didn't put their heart and souls into Bluewater Creamery just to give up at the first sign of trouble.
It was time for Plan B.
They are now hoping to buy an ice cream truck, which would allow them to both make and sell their ice cream products from the vehicle, thus satisfying provincial regulations.
Bluewater Creamery has started a Kickstarter campaign with the hope of raising $15,000 by Dec. 7 towards the purchase of the truck, which would likely cost upwards of $50,000 in total.
Ideally they would like to be on wheels by May.
"We want to make a unique product and we want to scoop it for our customers," said John Saturday at the Guelph Farmers' Market.
"We don't want to be confined to a dairy and sell wholesale. That was never our objective."
Creating and selling non-dairy products has had its benefits, with the Pusic's reaching out to a whole new audience. But ice cream is their main focus.
"We're doing some cool, amazing stuff right now. But for every non-dairy customer there's three dairy customers," he said.
"We could have given up. But when you have something in your soul that's telling you to move forward, you don't give up. It's like we're telling our kids that you don't give up. You follow your dream."
For more information about Bluewater Creamery, visit www.bluewatercreamery.ca.
