Using innovation to save declining species

Glen and Alex Smyth have ambitious plans for a once commonplace fruit that many Canadians are no longer familiar with. 

Billed as North America’s only crab apple orchard, Appleflats Foods near Wellesley is on a mission to save a species and grow a new industry in the process. 

The young co-founders didn’t set out to be apple growers or food processors, but their entrepreneurial approach has landed their crab apple jellies and cocktail mixers in more than 400 retail outlets in Ontario, including Sobeys, Foodland, Metro and Farm Boy. They’re also budding ag-tech innovators and their urban harvest program is eliminating thousands of pounds of food waste. 

Why it matters: Crab apples were commonplace in Ontario until after the Second World War, but now they are disappearing from the landscape, which endangers their survival. 

“People love our family business story, but this species will go extinct if our business fails,” said Glen Smyth. “That’s why our tagline is ‘buy a bottle, save a species’.”

It all began in 1991 when his parents, aunt and uncle bought a landlocked property next to an environmentally protected wetland near Wellesley to build a house. They marked the completion of their new family home by planting a tree, which just happened to be a heritage variety crab apple. 

His mother, Ruth Abernethy, turned the fruit into jelly using juice from the pressed apples, a technique still used at Appleflats today. Apples are harvested, pressed and the juice frozen to reduce storage needs and let the company produce fresh jelly year-round. 

Their first big sale was 330 jars of jam to nearby Monforte Dairy in Stratford. And it wasn’t until the dairy came back for more that the Smyth brothers learned they couldn’t just go to the Ontario Food Terminal or other produce sellers to source the fruit needed for their jelly.

“Crab apples really fell off the map between about 1945 and 1975. They drop easily from the tree so municipalities don’t like them because they plug up sewers, and they’re too small so you can’t grade them and pack them like other apples,” Smyth says.

By this time, both brothers had spent time working in the oil patch and decided to come home to Ontario to give fruit farming a try. They invested their earnings into crab apple orchard plantings in 2016, but that didn’t solve their immediate fruit shortage problem. So, they began reaching out to homeowners and municipalities, offering to harvest their crab apple trees. 

“We now harvest 750 sites from Strathroy to Peterborough, which is about 50 per cent of what exists of this species in the wild,” Smyth says. “We maintain the trees and harvest the fruit, they get the blossoms and we’ve prevented over 100,000 tons of food waste in the process.” 

Crab apple trees are harvested much like olives – shaking the tree drops the fruit onto tarps, which are emptied into an apple sorting machine his father invented. It cleans the fruit and separates leaves and branches for municipal waste. 

The 44-inch-long battery-operated sorter and a 48-inch apple bin fit into the back of a truck, which the Smyths rent for $20 a day, and can support 1,500 pounds of apple harvest daily. Harvest happens during the last three weeks of August using student workers.

“We do this because we don’t have money to buy things and it’s expensive to get into farming,” Smyth says, adding that simplicity is the secret behind their successful urban harvest business. 

“The sorter is moveable, safe to use with only a single button to push, and it’s possible to train a student how to use it in only 30 minutes or less.” 

The sorter’s innovative design landed the brothers on Dragon’s Den. Smyth hopes to learn shortly if they’ll be airing as part of season 16. A mechanical tree shaker is also in development. 

There is no official crab apple breeding program in Ontario, so they’re also doing their own breeding experiments to establish optimal tree spacing, pruning, shade requirements, ideal rootstock and more. 

In addition to their jellies and cocktail mixers, Appleflats also sells to craft cideries and is developing partnerships for new crab apple products like freezies and ice cream. An exciting development would be a beverage like a crab apple ginger ale or a crab apple radler, Smyth suggests, although production is not yet high enough to sustain that kind of fruit demand. 

Last fall, Appleflats began selling into Michigan and the company has big plans for U.S. expansion.