Faculty of Environment alumni Sarah and Jordan van der Heyden are old hands at what many of us are going through for the first time right now — working together, but apart.
Jordan’s love of libations led him to opening Willibald Farm Distillery and Brewery on a family farm in Ayr, Ontario. Sarah founded Boosh, an indie cosmetics brand hand-making lipstick, lip gloss and lip balm with a little help from the bees living on their property.
While the couple are bonded together by love, marriage, and a sense of duty to the environment, they’re each blazing their own distinct trail with two of the hottest brands in their industries.
Meet two young entrepreneurial role models for how to manage our dreams, work together, and thrive in world changing faster than any of us can keep up with.
“How did we meet? That credit probably goes to the alphabet,” says Sarah (nee Walker) on a breezy summer day at their bucolic country farm. “In high school we had some of the same classes. Because of alphabetical seating charts we were close to each other. He would give me paper and let me borrow pens.”
The two shared the same hallways for many years at Cambridge, Ontario’s Southwood Secondary School. Occasionally they would cross paths — as friends — until Jordan eventually asked Sarah out on a date via email.
“I definitely was nervous at first, but we always had so much in common that the relationship was always easy from the beginning,” says Jordan. “With us first dating near the end of high school, there were so many unknowns for our longer-term goals for post-secondary, but when we both got into UW, it then seemed realistic that we’d become more than a high school couple.”
Fate would smile on the couple again.
“After we started dating we realized that not only were they going to the same university, but the same faculty,” adds Sarah. “It was a happy accident.”
Jordan had entrepreneurship in his DNA, which made him a perfect fit for the Environment and Business program in the School of Environment Enterprise and Development (SEED). It helped that his parents, owners of a successful travel agency, had shown him the rewards of transforming a passion into a business.
He had another advantage — his family farm.
The 100 acre property connected the van der Heyden’s with a piece of their history. Jordan’s father came from a family of farmers. Originally used for dairy production, the farm had fallen on hard times.
“It was in pretty rough shape,” Jordan says. “The land had been farmed conventionally for decades. Chemicals and poor crop rotation had depleted the nutrients in the soil.”
Having worked on sustainable business conversions in SEED, Jordan wanted to restore the farm. With his parents’ blessing, he started looking for ways to bring it back to life.
He found that there was room in the market to start a distillery, so in 2012 he recruited his brother Nolan, a mechanical engineering student at Waterloo, and their childhood friend Cam Formica to help him launch the operation. Last year they partnered with another childhood friend from Ayr, Joe Freund (whose last name translates to friend in German), to launch the beer operation here at the farm.”
Before the founders could begin working on recipes for gin and whisky, they had to rebuild and rezone their barn for distilling. They installed a geothermal loop under the parking lot to cool the stills and reduce water consumption. Between the barn and the fields, they erected solar panels to offset their energy use.
When it came to caring for the soil and crops, the team chose to turn back the clock. The young farmers collaborated with a neighbouring farm to let their cattle graze in the fields . Leftover sludge from distilling, a mixture of water and finely ground grain, fertilized the pasture and the cattle soon offered a convenient source of beef for Willibald’s kitchen.
A lifelong friend also built an apiary on the property, which allowed bees to pollinate the plants.
After three years of planning and work the farm bounced back and they began production of a gin under the label Willibald, (pronounced will-ee-bald), the middle name of Jordan and Nolan’s maternal grandfather.
Since everyone else involved with Willibald was doing more than one job, why not those pollinating bees?
Sarah who’d pursued her love of ecology at the School of Environment Resources and Sustainability (SERS), was developing her own ambitions. Since she was young she’d had difficulty fulfilling her need for clean makeup that wouldn’t aggravate her sensitive skin.
With full support of her entrepreneurial extended family she began hand-making organic, sustainable cosmetics — including a unisex balm using Willibald’s gin botanicals. Confident in her product she founded Boosh (like the French name for mouth) to produce a product line out of a renovated milking parlour in a barn on the farm.
“Bees wax adds a healing element to all the products,” says Sarah, who wanted the entire operation to be environmentally friendly. “We didn’t want any plastic in our packaging, so we designed them ourselves and had them manufactured from aluminum.”
It all sounds so effortless now that Boosh is a success. But Sarah had not grown up with the same confidence in business that Jordan had. Coaching her through that early learning curve fell to her now mother-in-law and business partner Linda van der Heyden. “Linda and I clicked personally and professionally right away.” Sarah says. “As a successful woman in business I couldn’t have had a better mentor. I would not have done this without her.”
With things going well. The fun part had finally begun. Willibald’s signature gin was catching on at local bars. Distinct from most gin’s due to a slightly darker colour, and unique aroma, it soon landed at the LCBO. Once word got around that this unusually coloured alcohol was, in fact, top shelf, they saw sales eventually pick up to the point where they could move forward with more products like vodka, beer (editors note: it’s the best IPA in the area code).
By 2019 things were going so well, friends and family were politely waiting for Sarah and Jordan to announce the obvious — an engagement.
“Yeah… everyone knew we’d probably be getting engaged,” says Jordan. “But honestly, we didn’t feel the need to make a big deal about that part. We wanted to have some fun with it.”
When friends and family gathered for an “announcement,” at the Willibald farm, everyone assumed it was an engagement party.
“People had a few drinks then Jordan’s dad told everyone they had a surprise waiting for them,” Sarah remembers. “Their faces when they walked up the hill and saw the complete wedding set-up, oh wow, that was definitely worth all of the secret planning we’d done.”
United in love and family, driven by crafting exceptional, sustainable products, it seemed like nothing could stop these two dynamic Faculty of Environment dynamos.
Willibald’s beer and spirits operation changed dramatically when Ontario declared a state of emergency on March 17. With the COVID-19 pandemic closing their doors closed to patrons, they reacted quickly to the change. Not only did they set up a drive-thru for Willibald’s beer and spirits, the distillery pumped out hand sanitizer for the community, including local charities, shelters, front-line workers and essential businesses.
“I was a scary time to be honest,” says Jordan. “We had to get an online store and delivery system up in a really short time period. There were some bumps for sure, but we are now shipping our drinks and sanitizer across the province.”
They couldn’t have done it without Nolan. His technical expertise — once critical to making a great drink — was now instrumental in making a quality sanitizer following the formula provided by the World Health Organization and received a stamp of approval from Health Canada.
“We’ll continue to make sanitizer for anyone who needs it to get through this difficult time,” says Jordan. “We have been through so much. Not just Sarah, and I, but our entire family. We got through things by working together and helping each other. We’re a part of this community and now we can help other families do the same.”
