Dutchman's Gold Doubles Sales After Family Handover

Sales at Dutchman's Gold have nearly doubled since Mark and Angela Ysseldyk bought the family honey business from her father in 2018, with online revenue driving much of the growth.

The company, founded in 1981 by John Van Alten and based in Carlisle, Ont., a Hamilton community 75 kilometres southwest of Toronto, now employs 16 full-time and 15 part-time workers. It buys honey from eight to 10 beekeepers in Ontario as well as suppliers in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Ninety-eight per cent of its sales come from within Canada.

The story began in 1980, when Van Alten and his wife, travelling across North America in a red van looking for a place to settle, landed in Carlisle. "A gentleman just happened to be selling 300 beehives," their oldest daughter Angela Ysseldyk recalls. She was two years old at the time. Her mother practised apitherapy — using bee products for healthy living — and a house stood for rent across from the bee yard. The family moved in and bought the hives, even though Van Alten had no beekeeping experience.

"Being young and not really having any clear direction, I thought it sounded like a great idea," says Van Alten, now 70. He calls the early years a "steep learning curve."

Within a year the family was selling honey, homemade granola, fresh bread and jam from its front porch, which carried a sign reading, "Take your honey and leave your money." Poor harvests in the first two years forced Van Alten to buy honey from local beekeepers and sell it under the Dutchman's Gold name, a nod to the family's Dutch ancestry. Distribution grew through the 1980s at the Guelph Farmers' Market, then into 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," Van Alten says.

The company was well positioned when honey and beeswax became mainstream wellness products, says Matt MacDonald, national leader of the food and beverage processing practice at advisory firm MNP. The Global Wellness Institute values the worldwide wellness category at $8.5-trillion, double its size in 2013.

"They're fortunate in the sense that they obviously believed in the honey and the wellness before it was a trend," MacDonald says. Dutchman's expansion from local to national markets, he adds, "proves you can have a successful, family-owned business that can scale in Canada."

E-commerce triggered the generational shift. In 2009, Angela Ysseldyk, then on maternity leave from a corporate job in the nutraceutical and supplement industry, built a website with her husband to sell Dutchman's products online as a side business. Mark Ysseldyk, who owned five health-food stores in Ontario at the time, sold his shops in 2014 to concentrate on the site. It reached $1-million in sales the following year, and Dutchman's later absorbed it.

By 2016, Van Alten wanted to wind down. After two years of transition planning with a lawyer and an accountant, he signed over the company. "We were the only ones who put our hands up," Angela Ysseldyk says of her and her husband among the five siblings. Angela joined full-time in 2023 to lead sales and marketing after a corporate restructuring eliminated her job.

Growth has not been frictionless. COVID-19 border closures in 2020 kept foreign workers from winterizing hives, slashing honey production and doubling supplier prices. "It caused us to have to ship products for about a year at a loss," Mark Ysseldyk says.

The company has rebounded and now aims to build slowly in bricks-and-mortar chains such as Whole Foods, Metro, Farm Boy and Sobeys, alongside online retailers Costco.ca and Amazon. Van Alten still unloads trucks and runs a forklift. "They've brought it up to a level that I never could have," he says of the second generation.