Host (00:05)

So are you from Kelowna?

Gerry (00:06)

I am yeah born in born here and raised between here in the shoe swap. cool

Host (00:11)

Yeah. So what was your childhood like?

Gerry (00:13)

my childhood was weird. it was very odd. it was, my parents separated when I was four and my mom and my brother and I moved to the shoe swap. be weekdays in the shoe swap and salmon arm and then weekends here. I was very odd

You know, I used to dress up a lot, pretend play. was my best friends were imaginary friends. You know, I was that kid. I was that kid that always was in his room for hours playing with little action figures and making up scenarios that would last like months at a time storylines that would last like a full year. yeah. I'd have, have some of my action figures would be like captured and frozen in time. And they I would literally freeze them for like a year.

the storyline would continue without them for a year. And then someone would like, they'd stage a heist to get him out of the fridge and, you know, yeah, like straight up, like it was.

Host (01:06)

Did you ever write ⁓

Gerry (01:08)

My

my mom always encouraged me to it was just sort of like the era of choose your own adventure books. And somebody came up with this, these books that were blank pages that just kind of had, the words were open for you to, to create, but they had So I remember vividly one being a dog that was kidnapped by aliens or something on the spaceship and you would have to write the story in your own

Yeah, I wrote some down when I was a kid, but it was more making up clubs and making up things that, that, was very, I was fairly isolated as a kid. we lived in low income housing, to start when my mom first moved up there. years later we got out of that and moved up to an area called North Broadview, which was all agriculture, orchards and farming, but there weren't many kids around. So a lot of bird watching.

A lot of playing in big fields and going on adventures. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really connected with nature part of, part of my childhood was, you know, not necessarily raiding orchards, but, know, picking an apple here and there, finding rhubarb or wild raspberries. that was kind of what we called, what I refer to now as nature's candy. ⁓ that was, that was kind of what we survived on back in the day.

Host (02:01)

like connected with nature and all that.

Did you go around on an old bicycle or something?

Gerry (02:23)

Yeah, we

had bikes but I mean South Broadview, I'm sorry North Broadview if anybody's familiar is very very hilly. Oh, okay. Yeah, so like going down the hill is great like getting somewhere awesome but getting back was just like whether you wanted to go one way to the beach which was canoe beach or the other way to downtown it was you know you're living on the peak of a hill on both sides so it was a lot of effort when you're a kid. You had to commit you had to be like I'm going to the beach today but I know that the pushing my bike up the hill all the way up that hill on the way back home is gonna suck.

Yeah.

Host (02:53)

⁓ it's kind of your childhood is I feel as if it's we strive for our children to have now. Be creative. Get off the screen.

Gerry (03:02)

Yeah, it's

That yeah, it was so

disconnected whereas today it's like the opposite right everything's at your fingertips ⁓ I hope I don't sound too old saying that but you know my kids I'm really proud of one of my one I have two children now one is ⁓ they're not children anymore, but my eldest is a videographer and filmmaker and mountain biker and my youngest is he's a writer and a rapper and and

They have access to so much nowadays that I didn't have access to, but they're very, very restrained on how they use it. So I'm really, really proud of my kids.

Host (03:36)

That's cool. Sounds like the creativity followed.

Gerry (03:39)

Yeah, yeah, clearly I was I think one of things I'm most proud of is that I gave birth, you know to I helped foster creativity within my children and and they grew up being creators

Host (03:51)

Yeah. You know, it's interesting that I feel as though, you know, at the beginning you were kind of saying like, I was that kid, like the creative kid. And it's interesting because in childhood, being a creative kid is frowned, like frowned upon. It's like, it's like not cool. But then when you turn into adulthood, it's all the creators are the interesting people.

Gerry (04:07)

was not cool.

Yeah

Host (04:15)

Like all of a sudden something flips in life and the creative people are the interesting ones. Yeah, everybody's

Gerry (04:22)

Yeah, I always say I always look back and I always wonder when you're when you're an accountant or your banker or you're a lawyer or you're you know, name your profession That's kind of traditional and you get into that, I guess these people that were creators or are creators become your outlet. They become your entertainment and

Host (04:41)

Cool one.

Gerry (04:41)

And

the cool ones, right? It's like, oh man, I wish I had known how to play guitar. I could have been Lenny Kravitz. You know what I mean? I could have been Prince. I could have been Lady Gaga. It could have been, you know, Bruno Mars. It could have been any of these had had I been pushed in that direction. We all dabble in creativity a little bit or were forced into it as kids, whether it's band or musical theater or theater or whatever you know, that's that's painted as no pun intended as such an unreliable career path.

Yeah, right. And it's it's it's frowned upon as you know, you'll never make any money doing that. You'll never have success doing that. You'll never amount to

Host (05:18)

quote traditional success being money.

Gerry (05:21)

Yeah.

Sure. But that's how it's framed when you're a kid. Right. And nowadays I look back on it in a different way. being that I chose a creative path with my life, I look back and go, man, why didn't I become a Marine biologist? My youngest son is such a water baby. He swims year he swims on his birthday, which is December 29th. he'll be out there with an axe. Yeah. He'll be out there with an axe punching a hole through the lake to go.

jump in like four or five times. Yeah. he loves the water. And so do I. We're such water, water babies. And, you know, I always keep, I keep pushing them like, if you're, if you're going to go to university and you're going to go into something that's non-creative, be a Marine go travel the world, study, you know, study all the wild animal life, oceanic life, you know, live, live on the water, surf every day in your off time, play beach volleyball, just

be that kid that's always swimming out to coral reefs around with sea turtles. I would be in absolute bliss had I taken that path. It would have been so rewarding, right? But even as a creator, and knowing that I was creative, was like, no, I really feel the calling to create all the time. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah.

Host (06:33)

So in my view, you had a pretty cool childhood. then where did you have any jobs when you were a teenager?

Gerry (06:38)

Yeah,

of course I did. Yeah, I started working for my dad, my dad, my stepfather, who I consider my father is, well, my biological father was a bartender. So I followed in his path pretty closely. I remember setting up, running around on weekends, making deliveries here in town. he oversaw a bunch of different venues in town, including Bernie's, which was then turned into flashbacks when then now is BNA. So I remember being in that building as a kid.

you know, standing on milk crates behind the bar and watching the bands warm up for the night. little bit of gophering for my biological father. And then my, my stepfather was a heating and plumbing contractor and he started his own school days, if I was you know, I'd be in my gym shorts and a t-shirt in the infirmary, not feeling well. And my dad would show up and he'd be like, Oh, perfect. Get in the And the next thing you know, I'd

standing some mobile home park holding aluminum siding on the side of a building in my gym shorts and my t-shirt, but you know, feeling like I was going to throw up in February. So I knew if my mom picked me up, I was going home for the traditional Price is Right grilled cheese sandwich, tomato soup. If my dad was picking me up, my dad showed up, my heart would sink. And I'd be like, no, I think I'm feeling better now. Like I'm feeling pretty good. But yeah. So I worked with

Host (07:52)

How sick are you?

Gerry (07:55)

You know, that's where I learned work ethic for sure from my parents and we always had a massive amount of chores. was lots of my parents, invested in a, in a home with everything that they had or didn't quite have. And we did the rest. We renovated it all ourselves. We did all the yard work we did, you know, built all the retaining walls. were down, down in the lake pulling out stones. You know, my dad had, we'd work all day with my friends and then my dad had put us in the back of the pickup truck and

say we're going to go for a dip in the lake. And we were thinking we were going to the beach, but he'd drive us down the access road down below our property to the murky lake. And we'd go in and be like, you know, we were hot and working in the sun all day. So we didn't care. But then he was like, everybody bring out a big rock every time you're in. So we ended up loading up the back of his truck with these rocks. ⁓ Yeah. Big heavy rocks and then ⁓ helped build a retaining wall at my parents place with that over the next few weeks. But yeah.

that's kind of where I got my work ethic. And then when I was, I would pick fruit when I was younger up in North Bravue, there was always berry picking. So you know, you'd make nothing, but you'd go there for, you know, six, eight hours a day and just pick berries and come home with, know, 17 bucks or something like that. And a full belly. Yeah, exactly. And a couple of bee stings, but yeah, that was kind of, kind of just what you did. And it was more so that, you know, I needed something to do during the summer and I didn't have any friends and that was just kind of accessible.

Host (09:04)

belly.

Gerry (09:16)

But then I ended up working when I was 13 or 14 I ended up working at the best Western In salmon arm during the day and then McDonald's at night. So I had two jobs all summer and in between I just skateboarded Yeah, I was a total little skater hip-hop skater kid.

Host (09:28)

See you on the skateboard.

Wow. You got quite the childhood. I'm sure there is a lot of everybody's childhood or stuff that goes on, it

Gerry (09:33)

Yeah, it was crazy

was the kid that was you know small town a lot of a lot of farming communities a lot of rough-and-tumble kids a lot of yeah a lot of hockey right and I didn't fit in that bowl I didn't fit in that mold so I was kind of you know picked on for you know an ostracized for being the weird kid yeah which I get I totally understand it now but back then it was like wow I you know even the friends that I had you know were pressured not to not to hang out with me anymore so I was

Host (09:48)

keyboard.

⁓ goodness.

it's heartbreaking. Look at you now. Okay, so then where did life take you after high school?

Gerry (10:13)

after high I really wanted to, I discovered theater when I was, in grade seven, I was, was, I was incredibly shy. when I say incredibly shy, like I would cry I would slide under and stare into my desk and cry. If I got called for show and tell, I was like, so terrified of public speaking, of being in front of people because I was odd. And when you're surrounded by a whole bunch of people that don't understand that.

and you see what they do understand is it got nothing to do with you or the scope of your imagination or your creativity. I mean, it's just.

I was terrified of being up in front of anybody because I thought I was because I felt I was so wrote a five minute my first public speaking engagement. Funny enough, it was was something that I had written on the service industry on serving and restaurants, which was weird because I ended up being in that up for almost 30 years. Right. So I'm I argue I'm still in that now as a supplier.

I discovered theater, I got cast in the school play when I was as the lead role when I was in grade seven and I couldn't get my way out of it and I went up and I guess I rocked it because it was was a great little two weeks or something of Christmas play and and I got the theater bug.

Host (11:27)

Are you able to, was it because maybe you were playing a different character that you were able to get all your shyness?

Gerry (11:33)

Yeah,

yeah. And that's also, you know, responsible for most of the mental health support that I've got over the last 13 years is actually, you know, looking hard at that and being like, okay, what masks are you wearing today? Like, are you still the entertainment today? Are you overcompensating in what you do today? Are you as your is the performance? Is it truly you or is it just a performance as a defense to steep?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have I have I'm an open book that way. I don't mind going deep at all, which is why, you know, I think my therapist like me because I show up and I'm like, let's go like you want to you want to do an autopsy on my childhood? Let's go. Let's let's dig in. But it was that it was the defense. was a defense of being bullied. was a defense of of people pointing their fingers at me and calling me names. And because I was different, because I was into different things, you know.

so from there I got into theater. My parents transferred me from the high school that I was supposed to go to because I went to this high school and on day one it was the same story and I came home in tears just saying it's never gonna change. You know, it's never gonna change. I immediately went to a larger pool of people with the expectation that I would find some more kids that were like me.

right beyond my elementary school. what I got was instead the first day being pointed out by everybody in my elementary school that we're now in this bigger pool as the loser in their school. Yeah, so the army grew. And so my parents, I came home the first day and they were like, there's no way you're going to that school. So they put me in this different school, ⁓ Jackson, Jail Jackson in Samadarm.

Host (13:01)

And now there's just more kids than a point.

Gerry (13:15)

which my son, my eldest, my first son is named after. His name's yeah, it changed my life. They were the only one there with a arts program, ⁓ like an art school.

that was like, you know, really focused on the weird, on the different, on the creative and had a really nice big section of their curriculum that was dedicated to that. So I embraced it. Yeah, embraced it. So I got into drama and I got into art and eventually musical theater. wasn't a time in high school where I wasn't in rehearsal for one play and then performing another, whether it be professional or amateur.

or festival plays. So we would tour and actually go and get adjudicated and be on stage and like in front of judging panels and stuff like that. So, and I lived in the theater. I became a horrible I was living in the theater.

Host (14:02)

Sounds like you became a great theater student.

Gerry (14:04)

I was a great theater student. In fact, I wasn't going to graduate. was short on credits because of the way that my schedule was. had a homeroom, then I had a spare, then I had English and then I had lunch. So I would rarely ever go to the first three, four hours of class. So instead I'd just go to the theater and paint sets or rehearse or, you know, do whatever. But when it came time to graduate, that bit me in the butt because I didn't have enough credits. ⁓ And I was told

⁓ about a week and a half out of, of before graduation, I was told that I wasn't, I didn't have enough to graduate. And so my, Shirley Tucker, my art, art drama and musical theater teacher pulled me aside and she said over my dead body. She's like, you were walking across that stage. I will make sure you're walking across the stage to get your diploma. So she, created a course called, stagecraft 11 A.

I remember I can see it on my report card. Stagecraft11a and she gave me an A+.

Host (15:04)

I was just thinking, I don't know if you know, but I was a school teacher for. And I have quite my own opinion on traditional education. this is until you said this, my my blood was just boiling because I was thinking the traditional way, like you got to jump through the hoops and do this, although you are doing everything that is the.

Gerry (15:08)

15 years. no way. Okay.

Host (15:32)

of what an awesome student and class should be. You were there, you were motivated, you were excited about it, you're giving your time, and yet that's not recognized. they started back in the day, like if you were playing like select soccer or hockey, they would recognize that, yes, it's outside the school and outside the curriculum, but they would give you gym credits for it. Because they started to recognize like you can

do and get so much out of life outside of these four walls. Yeah. You know, so as soon as you ended that and was like this teacher stepped up for you, my heart was just like, that's right.

Gerry (16:08)

Yeah, yeah. So she was the reason that I graduated. she recognized that I had put in a lot of time and effort and commitment. Like I would sleep at the theater. my mom would come to the theater to give me food and she'd be like, how many days you've been here? How long you've been here for? And I'd be like, is my third day sleep. I would sleep on the set.

Host (16:26)

Yeah, so like you're yeah, so like people who were who don't understand this it's in life and in education Would you get more out of sitting? Reading a book doing papers in some class you're totally not interested in but you quote unquote get credits for it Right, or you're working your butt off actually being inspired and a part of something that's gonna it's helping you in life You know what I mean? Yeah ⁓

Gerry (16:50)

Yeah.

Yeah, so for me it just became a whole lifestyle of playing more characters. And while I went super deep into each character that I played and really enjoyed it and like I said lived in the theater pretty much all the time, again that wasn't truly who I was at my core. I was just disappearing into characters all the time as a defense as well. I don't know, damned if you do damned if you don't, because I really enjoyed it and it was a-

Host (17:18)

give

you confidence.

Gerry (17:19)

Confidence,

right? Because when I step out in front of people as myself, I was terrified. But if I stepped out in front of people in as a character, it was like, okay, this is where I get to actually show you what I'm capable of. Right? So yeah.

Host (17:35)

an interesting thing who is your real self because I find I don't know if everybody experiences this but depending on where I am and who I'm with I'm a different person ⁓ you know I'll be incredibly open and gregarious and confident and when it's small people like one or two people

But then as soon as I'm with a bunch of people, I'm like, I don't like the small chat. I'm not interested. Give me a little crew and I'm good. But yeah, it's just like, who are you?

Gerry (18:05)

Yeah,

and I'm ⁓ like with with the mental health work that I've done over the last 13 to 15 years, it's it's it's getting me back to a point now where I'm kind of a blank slate and and all of those defenses that I've that I were that I built around my inner child, so to speak, to protect him when when I was younger, and all of the sort of activities that supported that now that those are gone and all of that is stripped away, I still have that

I still have those defenses. And so it's been a lot of taking those defenses down to the point where now I'm, now I'm, I'm a blank slate. So as my therapist said, you know, some of my set therapists have told me they're like, you just need to go discover what you like and what you dislike truly. Yeah. you like hanging out a lot around a lot of people?

No, I don't really you know, i'm still I still am more most comfortable, you know at home in my room, right creating characters in my head or scenarios, right and now Luckily, I get to do that with my business I get you know, I get to do ⁓ creative things and be creative every day in in some aspect But i'm still now just discovering what kind of books I like What kind of activities I like i'm trying new things i'm you know, yeah reading new articles that I wouldn't have looked at before because I just

So much of it was that defense character work that now it's like, okay, well truly who am I? Right? And then how do I explain that to other people?

Host (19:31)

Do you also feel like finding like truly who you are is also trying it's kind of fleeting and that you're trying to catch something that's always changing and evolving because as you get older and life experience and becoming a dad and like you're constantly changing.

Gerry (19:47)

Yeah, and you don't have time to clock it because it moves so fast Yeah, right. Like I remember changing diapers yesterday and now my you know I looked up and my son's walking across the the stage grabbing his diploma this summer, right? It's like

Host (20:00)

And

your role has changed so much from when they're young and they need you to now your role as a father must obviously change to needing you in a different way.

Gerry (20:09)

Yeah, not only my role, but my character as a father has changed. ⁓

Host (20:14)

⁓

because you see it through your craft. Right, and seeing it as a role. it... Yeah, that's really interesting. It is a role, isn't it?

Gerry (20:18)

Yeah.

Absolutely. Right. And you don't know what you're doing when you start out. Right. And then so you just fall back on what you do know, which is, you know, your previous experiences with any authority, authority, right? how you were treated by your parents, how your parents, what your, sayings that your parents tell you, know, there's that old adage, you know, you're, you're going to become your mother or father one day, or you just, wake up one day and you're telling your kids something and your father's voice comes out of your mouth.

Host (20:52)

Absolutely, close the door.

Gerry (20:54)

Yeah, were you born in a barn? Right? ⁓ good thing you're heat. We're heating the outside tonight. The animal you know, you hear yourself saying those things. You're like, why do I say, my gosh, I sound like my dad or sound like my mom. So when you step back from that again, and you're like, what kind of parent do I want to be like my parents, you know, they did a very good job. And they were they're lovely. I love my parents beyond belief. But when you step back from that kind of

Structure and you look at it and you're like, well, what would I change? What would I tweak? What would what was the what was some of the things that they did that were a little heavy-handed that I didn't like when I was a kid that I found were a little detrimental to my my my My progress or my growth, right and then you kind of look at it like well And you have to understand too. It's not a one-size-fits-all too, right? Like for parenting you like I have to listen to my children. They're different people than I am, right? They're way different than me

Host (21:48)

And they're

being raised in a totally different world than what you were raised in. Which I struggle with. Me too. I don't understand that, like my kids are in elementary school so they're on the other end of it. Right. But ⁓

Gerry (21:53)

Completely, right?

Host (22:02)

Yeah, it's how do you I can't connect I cannot understand the pressures of children in this day and age. Yeah, we never lived through it We've never lived through the social media and the full grade two and four that some of their classmates have phones I'm like I don't like right. I never had

Gerry (22:23)

Imagine having the conversation that I was having with my kids when nine and they were like, we need a cell phone. I'm like, for what? Who are you going to call? Like, what are you, trading stocks? Like, do you have a podcast? Are you tweeting? It's internet. But here's the thing about that generation. We're witnessing, like, mean, we had computers, right? We had the rise of Apple. We had the rise of video. Yeah, I'm 51.

Host (22:35)

I think it's the internet.

Well, do you mind asking how old?

OK, so I'm 40. So we're a nerd.

Gerry (22:52)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we had the rise of Apple, the rise of computing, the rise of the cell phone being integrated, but that was more in like our twenties. For me, it was my twenties that cell phones really became a, became a thing, mobile phones. But, ⁓ but this is the first major group of, of youth that have been raised by something far more intelligent than we could ever be. And they have unlimited access to it. They were raised by Google.

Partially, they were raised by t-

Host (23:20)

They are, they are too, because even if you keep your kids away from it, it's still, you know, if they ask the question, you don't know what it is. What do we say? let's Google it.

Gerry (23:29)

Yeah, Google it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But for me, it's it's ⁓ it's it's the cutting of any excuse. I was at a bartending seminar once with a bunch of young bartenders. And there's a gentleman in Victoria, good friend of my name, Sean Sewell, who also has a podcast. He's quite successful as a mentor in the bar world. ⁓

And there was a bunch, they kept raising their hands. Every time we'd talk about something, I was one of the panelists. And every time someone raised their hand, they'd be like, that seems hard. Or, you guys make it seem so easy. Or, that's going to take a lot of time. And finally, he just, by the fourth hand, he just stopped everyone. He's like, stop. He's like, you've got to be kidding me. He's like, you are the first generation where anything that you need to know is at your fingertips.

Don't tell me it's hard. Don't tell me you can't do it. Don't tell me you don't know how. Don't tell me it's going to take too long to learn when you can all pull out your phones right now and go, how do I make a vanilla walnut orgea and look it up on your phone and you'll have an instructional video, a recipe, a step-by-step guide. And now you'll have AI telling you it's almost too easy how to do it. So anything that you want to learn is at your fingertips. Whereas our generation, we had to either have a mentor or be

or go to a library or a reading trial and error, right? And I'm not trying to say that that's either one is easier or harder. I'm just saying that everything is at your fingertips nowadays.

Host (24:44)

a little

I miss the mystery of back in the day. Yeah. And that, you know, somebody had created something that you didn't know what it was. And you know, you kind of had a, there was something magical or mystical about that. Right. You know, the knowledge.

Gerry (25:10)

But there's like, uh, there's walking into my son's classrooms for parent teacher night and seeing, know, they've got a smart wall as their, as their class, there's no chalkboard. It's all smart boards, right? Uh, they're raised on tablets when summer camps would come along for, for like daycare and summer camps. I'd be like, which one do you guys want to do? And they're like, Oh, we want to do coding. And I'm like, you seriously want us to do two weeks of coding every day. Yeah, it's going to be awesome. And I'm like, they want to go.

Host (25:20)

know, it's all smart boards.

Gerry (25:39)

code like my children can code your children probably can code

Host (25:44)

Well, now you don't even need to because AI will just code everything for you. It's in one decade, codings have gone.

Gerry (25:47)

There it is.

Right? Yeah.

But even prior to AI, like that's something that I never would have entertained. I was like, you got Lego, you got soccer, you got coding. And they were like coding for sure. Right. It's that Minecraft Roblox generation. they have so much for as easy as and accessible everything has become. They also have a completely unique worldview. I find that's completely different from

Host (26:06)

Yeah.

Gerry (26:20)

my generation before. I think they're much more aware. Like my youngest, he works at the shop, he works at our business. And he phoned me last night, said, dad, would it be okay if I didn't work tonight? And most kids, when I was a kid, it was because I wanted to go have a sleepover. There was a good TV show on that night that I didn't want to miss. I was tired from gym for him. It's like

I'm like, sure, everything okay. And he's like, yeah, I've got my genocides, genocide studies test tomorrow. And I really, really want to do good in this class because I'm really into it. I'm like, you're really into it. He's like, yeah, like I'm learning about Darfur right now. And I'm passionate about all of this stuff that I'm learning. Right. So it's like, it's really cool. It's really interesting to see what they're in. I would never think that my son would be really into genocide studies.

As a topic or anyone really like I get it Yeah, but like really passionate about that sort of human rights aspect of things But yeah, you know, they they always bring bring things to my attention whether it's environmental whether it's you know world events whether it's something in our community, they're always very Worldly minded which I which I applaud Yeah

Host (27:35)

really cool.

Let's bring her back though. So you were in high school? Yeah. You got into theater, the mass of all your different characters and then we kind of went off on a tangent there. Right. So. And then where did life take you after?

Gerry (27:41)

The- Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

I got married young. I married when I was I just turned 20. So I was was working here in Kelowna and

One night I went to pick up, my wife who was working at a coffee shop at the time, and there was a newspaper there and I was reading that it was Vancouver center, Vancouver province. And I, I looked in the back of it just through the, just reading through it. And there was this ad and it was like the head of casting for ABC television. And this guy from the William Morris agency want to meet you. And there was just a phone number that was it. And I was like, I'm calling this number.

That's all it said was, you know, these two names, I won't say their names here, it's two names. One was an agent, big agent from the William Morris agency. The other was the head of casting for ABC television at the time. I called it and they're like, yeah, come to Vancouver. It's tomorrow, tomorrow. And, and it's Friday, Saturday.

Or Saturday, Sunday. This was on a Friday night at like 7 a.m. So I raced and got a book of monologues and I tried memorizing two monologues on the way. My mother-in-law ⁓ drove me to the coast that night. Wow. To make it. And I had a really good weekend. I didn't end up doing, I couldn't memorize anything someone else had written. So I wrote two monologues of my own. And they were like, who wrote that? Like it was more of a, that was great. But like, who wrote that?

And then I did my second one on the Sunday and they were like, who wrote that? And I was like, I did. So I got pulled aside at the end of it. And they you need to move to Vancouver right away, like within two weeks and you need to sign with this agent here in Vancouver. And then we're going to start working on something for you in the States. And so the idea was that I would come on and be, and do you have my own series? And it was going to be called Job's version. last name is Job.

They're like, what kind of series would you like? Like, what kind of like, do you have something in your head that you think would be good on television? I said, yeah, I said, I have this concept for an idea called Job's version, because I like to tell big fish tales. I'm a performer. I'm a big goof. So my friends always say, you know, here comes Job's version. yeah. You hear everyone else's version of how it went. Then mine has got like explosions and guns being drawn and like I'm a big, you know, big fish. Take a take a wilder reel in with a long in the tooth.

As we're discovering probably today. yeah. So the concept of the show was half the show would be the actual events. And then the second half of the show would be me telling it to somebody else. And it would be my they loved the concept. I started working on that and then, eventually, unfortunately that all fell apart, due to,

argument with the agent that they wanted me to sign on with, which was a shame. But then I got into, I learned that I had something in my writing. So I started going to Gastown actor studio to become an actor. And I started writing and, you know, started a little production company with my friends and started making short films. And yeah, it was really cool.

Host (30:48)

I feel like you have a whole childhood yourself on how to write.

Gerry (30:52)

Yeah, so we got, I had some cool things happen. had a, one of my projects was, was with Showcase. they

They had a $4.1 million budget or something like this. And we did location scouting and we started casting for it and stuff like that. And then the budget got deferred to another project. I, mine got shut down again. And then I had, I spent a whole summer with a group of seven other young actors and writers and creatives in a Had this awesome house in East Vancouver. It's big, beautiful house called the wall. We called it the Waldorf. And we wrote a series Body and Soul.

It was kind of like Northern Explosion meets the gym. It was about a recovering gym, recovery gym like for people that like athletes who had been severely injured or police in the line of duty. So every episode you had the core cast of characters that were like personal trainers and rehab specialists, but it was also very kind of light and quirky and funny as well, but it had a lot of heart. And it was a story about these trainers and then every episode you'd have like a guest star. This was like pre-entourage. okay.

pre these shows that are like, know, celebrity cameo, celebrity cameo, but like one episode we wrote Shaq into it. And then another episode we an actor or an actress into it. Like they were got hurt doing stunts. The first one, first pilot episode that we wrote was a police officer was wounded in the line of duty. so anyway, it was a really cool experience. And then brought it to Clint Eastwood's production company, Palomino.

and they were opening up a studio in Montreal. So they flew out to meet me and it was really, I was super cool. And they sent contracts over like this, what it's going to look like. I would have had an executive producer credit on it and had writing credit on it. It would have been very so I had this big of my friends all pitched in when that was going down, they bought a magnum of champagne for me. And for the next 20 years, I moved to that magnum of champagne.

to every single one of my residences every time I moved I would have to lug this thing out of the bottom of the fridge and it took up the whole bottom of my fridge. I never got to open it. I ended up throwing it out. ⁓ I was just like, okay, this is never going to happen. So I started writing comics.

Host (32:58)

That's got to be emotionally, like the roller coaster of.

Gerry (33:02)

I'd phone my mom and dad and then they'd phone all the relatives and then all the relatives would be chiming in like, it's gonna be amazing. He's got his own show. my god. he wrote this thing and it got picked up. it's gonna be a movie. ⁓ he's got a television series. So it never quite happened. And then I started writing comics because I was a huge comic book geek when I was a kid. I still But I started writing comics and doing that. So traveling to Seattle and being the only writer at the Emerald City Comic Con.

You know three four years in a row being the only writer going around giving scripts because everyone else was just artists They'd be bringing their portfolios and i'd be handing out. ⁓ interesting, you know scripts and stuff like that and so i've always been doing that and I got really really close to writing batman at one point which was really cool because I

Batman, but I wasn't well versed enough with the universe. I'm more of a Marvel guy. so yeah, I still write. still dabble. I work on a comic called which is my friend Andrea Grant. she lives in California, but she was based in New York for years. We did a couple, couple four issue runs of it with artists in the past and published it under her publishing house. But then now we're kind of rebooting it for some other stuff. some other people that are interested in it. So working a little bit on that here and there and yeah.

anyway, so I ended up being supporting myself in the bar industry during that time. And that's when I met my current business partner, him and I were both what we call day dudes the infamous Roxy and

Host (34:26)

What's a date?

Just like a day bartender?

Gerry (34:28)

Daydude is a guy that goes in and is like the lowest on the totem pole and basically goes in and preps everything for the night shift. restocks all the fridges, cuts all the lemons and limes, fills all the juice bottles, all of that stuff. So I started bussing and portoring at night, bar backing at night, and then doing that during the day. And it just so happened that my current business partner, Dave Simpson, his uncle owned all these places, all these bars on Granville Street. And so that him and I would cross paths, but we both came from the same, you know, bow

of the most infamous bar in Canada. That's kind of where we started.

Host (35:02)

do you want to transition into how your business started?

Gerry (35:05)

Yeah, sure. Yeah, so I moved back to Kelowna after many years. went through divorce and dealt with all that

the trials and tribulations of that. moved back here. I started working at Rod's regional table with Chef Butters and the team there and Audrey Sorow was there for eight years, eight awesome years. And during that time pioneered the field to cloud what we call the there's farm to table. So I wanted something that echoed that. So I came up with field to glass. I was maybe one of two, maybe three.

that were kind of storytellers, ⁓ working with ingredients. So doing high concept cocktails that kind of had some whimsy to them that kind of, know, this comes out on a copy of this book and this passage is high highlighted. You have to go through the book and read all the highlighted passages while you sip this cocktail. And there's another element that comes through halfway through. That's part of the story that you're reading. And like, that's the type of stuff that we would, that I was doing. There was another guy in, in Europe, ⁓ Tony Kniegley,

who was doing that kind of style of cocktailing at the time. And then there's another guy, Napa Valley by the name of Scott Beatty, who was really the, like the, the godfather for the ⁓ field to glass movement. He was taking everything from the land and then transforming that into ingredients and then incorporating those ingredients into his cocktail. And what I was doing was a kind of a combination of all, all three of us. So I was taking like, like Tony did like the McDonald's apple pie as a cocktail that would come in.

the McDonald's apple pie box and you'd puncture it with a straw and like drink it and it would be like the McDonald's apple pie. Wow. He did a Coco Chanel, but he did it as a champagne and he did it as a sparkling cocktail. So it had all the aromatics of Coco Chanel, but it drank like a champagne and it had like the Coco Chanel like champagne glass. Like he did some cool like high concept stuff like that. And what I would do was I was kind of a combination of those two guys on my own and I would go out and I would take

rose thorns and I would make rose thorn bitters and then I would you know go and take gunpowder green tea and I would smoke it and I would do this and then I would do like a cocktail called like guns and roses and make it with the rose thorn bitters and cherry extract and this and that and the other thing all made from local produce ingredients and then it was served on a copy of motley cruz the dirt like a hardcover copy so it would come to your table or I would have a little speaker that played a song from motley crew right every time it was served or

you know, those type of things. So it was still like taking all the ingredients, much like Scott was doing in Napa, but then also taking the high content, high, high concept storytelling, imagination, Willy Wonka. So you, yeah. And that's kind of who I am. Like it's that's to me, that's the best of both worlds. As far as like I can dig down to who I am. That's kind of me. I'm a pop culture geek. I love everything to do with, you know, creative pop culture, art.

music history, all of that stuff. I'm a huge junkie for that. had to translate that into something that you can eat or drink or experience was kind of my forte. So I got known as that guy. Yeah.

Host (38:10)

Cool. Really

cool. What do you think is your drink that you developed? Or it's not even a drink, it's more of an experience.

Gerry (38:19)

I, I think my, I've had a couple of pinnacles for sure, but I think my pinnacle was I did, I was in a competition in and I had already won it. Did I have won it one year prior? I might've already won it before. I've won it two years in a row. but I think this was my second year doing it. I did my cocktail, the cocktail challenge was to base it on, a major city and I got Chicago.

So instead of just doing, yeah, was Chicago. That was the theme. Like me and the other competitors had to do a cocktail based on So most of them were like, ⁓ this is like Al Capone's, this is so sad, or this is like, you know, Al Capone's favorite drink, or this is this, or this is that, or this one's based on this building, or this one's based on this, you know, thing that happened. But I did Ferris Bueller's Day Off. And I did it based on every location that they went in the film.

And I actually smoked it in a vintage lantern. So I actually mixed the cocktail in a vintage kerosene lantern the cow kicked over that started the Chicago fire. And then I had a dark chocolate marmalade vermouth that I made at the Chicago stock I can't remember what floor, the floor that they look out the window three characters, Cameron and, and Simone and Ferris look out.

it's based on that building and on the 68th floor or the hundred and 68th floor, their main dessert was a dark chocolate marmalade cake mousse. That's been their signature thing from day one. So I took laughing stock vineyards wine because it was started by stock traders. And I turned that into a dark chocolate marmalade for mousse. And then I imparted that into a whiskey. And then I smoked it all in this lantern.

I made a cracker jack chocolate bar that came in a cracker jack package. And when the judges opened it, each one had a fondant recreation of the day at the Isle of Grand-Jatte. I believe that's name of the painting in Ferris Bueller that Cameron loses himself into the pointillism painting. actually had that printed, actually digitally printed on edible fondant. And then the chocolate bar that it was based on was a cracker jack chocolate bar.

Host (40:24)

my god.

Gerry (40:25)

Yeah. And then there was other elements of it, right? I did the whole, know, Wrigley Field was part of the movie where they, you know, they go to the baseball game. so everywhere that they went, every location, I had the history of that building incorporated into the cocktail in my action or the delivering of the cocktail or the execution of the cocktail had to do with the incidences that happened at each of these locations. But it was all Ferris Bueller's day off.

Host (40:53)

You must have had, how much lead up time did you have to...

Gerry (40:54)

while. Yeah, that was that was a pretty

Well, at this time I was a full-time student. was actually on my way to law school. It's a major side quest. School? Yeah. I think it was the family. And when I say the family, think my family and my former wife's family of wanting something secure because I was such a creative.

Host (41:04)

⁓

Okay! Where'd that come from?

Gerry (41:26)

Yeah. such a, and you know, I wanted to open a bar or a restaurant. That was my goal. Like I want to do this for the rest of my life because this is who I am. Yeah. In my mind at the time, that was who I was. Right. But yeah, yeah. So I decided, okay, law school and I got accepted to UBC, UBC law school and I was on my way. And I got recruited by Jack Daniels to come work for them. So ⁓ instead of going to law school, ended up working for Jack Daniels

being divorced. Not to make light of it, but it's been you know, it's been a long enough time. can look back and be like, that's kind of the crazy life path.

Host (41:54)

So what were you doing?

Yeah, it is. It's very interesting. So what were your roles and responsibilities with Jack?

Gerry (42:08)

well, was the interior territory manager, so I would have to look after everything that was Jack centric from, know, the Kootenays to, you know, a Suey's to Revelstoke to Invermere, all those places. So I was just basically interior sales. And then I for a while to do consulting. went and I was, ⁓ started my own consulting firm and I was doing really well for bars and restaurants. And then I came back, they offered me, I said, I would come back if I could be the brand ambassador.

Cause I really enjoyed the history of the brand. really enjoyed the people and I really enjoyed the brand itself. I still, I still do. don't drink anymore, but I still, you know, really look fondly on my time with Jack Daniels. three years later, two or three years later, they came back and they had created the role and I saw that they created the role and, I reached out to them. said, they said, you know what, when you're creating this role, we just brought in everything that you did with the brand before and said, let's just, we're looking for Jerry Job here. Like we're looking for what?

this kind of stuff that he did when he had the brand in his hands. I was very creative with the brand on my executions, my displays, on my events.

Host (43:10)

I was thinking when you were saying that you went to sales and managing if you lost a piece of your creative you were trying to a way to bring it in.

Gerry (43:16)

No, I brought it

all the time. Yeah. So I was always doing something very cool with the brand, always doing something that they hadn't thought of or bringing it to new areas or new audience. And so they had this track record of the things they had done. And when they were piecing together this, this role as the ambassador, the spokesperson for the brand, they wanted all of somebody that could embody those same elements and that same sort of

creativity and gravitas and you know that I literally signed up for LinkedIn. My last contract ended with for my consulting and I got convinced by a couple local reps to join LinkedIn. So I joined LinkedIn that afternoon and the next morning I woke up and the first LinkedIn notification that I had on my phone was job posting my that might interest you or something like that. And I looked at it.

What's this? And it's like brand ambassador, Jack Daniels. And I was like, you got to be kidding me. So I immediately sent my resume as a joke to my old boss and was like, hi, I'd like to apply for this. he phoned me up and he's like, you SOB. can you believe that we're actually looking for Jerry Job? I'm like, no. And he's like, literally it's on the paperwork is that we want somebody on paper that is Jerry Job and you're the first one that applies. Are you kidding me? I said, Hey, I told you I'd come back.

Host (44:15)

All the stars are just

Gerry (44:34)

If you had it, if you built this role, I'll come, I'm here. And so he's like, look, like we got to do our due diligence. It's a big, big, you know, it's one of the top four, four it's the number one selling whiskey in the world. It's the top four. The parent company is one of the top four corporations in the world. We got to make sure we do our corporate stuff and they're trying to find me and I'm literally like, yeah, I can do they said, you know, give it a month and a half.

Host (44:54)

Which is hilarious because they're trying to find

Gerry (45:02)

and we're going to interview a bunch of people. And if we're still looking for Jerry Joe, then it's yours. And then, yeah, it was literally, I got a phone call. It's like, you got four days to leave Kelowna, moved Vancouver, and we're putting you on a plane for media training in Toronto. And then we're sending you to Nashville for 10 days. And then you come back to Toronto for another four, and then you're going to fly to Vancouver and hopefully have a place by then. But you're going to be in the air for about close to, you know, three weeks.

Host (45:28)

That's just a whirlwind.

Gerry (45:29)

Yeah. So I moved all my stuff into storage and arrange movers and went and got the job up and running, stayed with a friend in Vancouver for a month and a half till I found my place and then found the place and moved in and did that for a bunch of years.

Host (45:41)

Holy smokes. How old are you at this time? ⁓

Gerry (45:44)

⁓ man.

⁓ I guess I'm in my 40s. And your 30s? Yeah, late 30s, early 40s. Yeah, it's very Forrest Gumpian. I've had I've had all sorts of adventures all over the all over the map. Wow. Yeah. I'm very blessed. Like, you know, every time I get some sort of medical thing that's going on with me, you know, my, kids get worried. And I always tell them like,

Host (45:51)

Feels like you've lived a life, man.

Gerry (46:08)

Don't worry if it's my time. I'm good. I'm good. I got to taste chocolate ice cream. I got to chase gelato. I got to go to Jamaica. I got to go here. I got to meet this person. I got to go up in the air. I got to fly. So much that we take for granted. I'm honestly good. I'm good. Most people fear age or death or anything. Not me, no. Not at all.

I'm like, I'm like, no, because like you live a fulfilled life and you live a full life and you get out there and you try to do your best. Do I have regrets? Tons. Do I have stuff that I flogged myself over, over and over like that happened 20 years ago in my head? Absolutely. I've made tons of mistakes, but I'm also human, right? And that's part of our journey is once you have that acceptance of being like, Hey, give yourself, give yourself a break on some of the things that you've done. all learning, right? But then also take stock and value in your journey. Yeah.

Host (47:00)

Yeah. Right. Wow.

Gerry (47:02)

Yeah. So if you wake up today and you're like, yeah, I know if I died tomorrow, I'd be like, it'd be horrible. It'd be the worst thing ever. I have so much life to live, then you better start getting up and getting on it. Yeah. Yeah.

Host (47:15)

Right on. Yeah. So I'm like all jet mode.

Gerry (47:18)

Told you

I was weird. ⁓

Host (47:23)

I don't think weird. I don't associate you with being weird. I associate you as being very interesting. And I think interesting like you're unique and I like interesting things, you know? Yeah. I really do. We don't have enough interesting people, you know? Actually, you know as soon as I say that, well, that's true, right? Because then it would be the norm. Yeah. Interesting, means it's not the normal, which is what makes it interesting. Yeah. But

Gerry (47:40)

If we had too many, it wouldn't be interesting.

Host (47:51)

I just had this weird thought that I hadn't thought of before and that was...

Because with the internet and social media and all this stuff and I say, there's, what did I say? There's not enough interesting in our world. I feel like maybe there is, it's just a lot of people have been in hiding because they're afraid to show their uniqueness.

Gerry (48:10)

Well,

it's kind of cool now because people can be anonymous. You know, yeah. During COVID, I wanted to do a podcast that was a complete character just focus on that. It's going to be called the cool work and the, the, the host is just a character I had to pop in my head one day named Charlie paper. And it was going to be just, and I was going to anonymously interview. People would not know it was me. I've hit up people that I knew and be like, Hey, you, you, want you to be on the cool work with Charlie paper.

And it was just finding people that did cool work, that did something cool for their profession. That was just different and interesting and just like not your average choice.

Host (48:49)

I feel like what was television series idea? was Jobe's version. I feel like this could still be something. It totally could. And I also feel with AI now that you could play both parts because you ⁓ could have AI modify your voice. So you could do the regular whatever it may be. And then you could do it in your version. This could still be a thing.

Gerry (48:54)

Chubsford.

Yeah.

You

know, when there was a thought, there was a thought at one point that it would be like, I would be the main character when, when the actual story was happening, but in the retelling, it would all be cast by like Hollywood cameos. like,

Host (49:17)

point.

Gerry (49:30)

I would be played by a completely different actor. It'd be some action star, good looking soap opera model that, know, is totally playing me how I see myself in that as the main character, kind of from a narcissistic perspective or an egocentric perspective, like look how cool I was when this happened or.

Host (49:48)

And

I also feel that would be such an awesome way to get the news in this day and age. Like if you just took a mundane story, whatever the news is of the week, can you just read it like whatever and then you go into your character and just make an absolute, however you want to twist it, man, I would listen to that. Like it would just bring so much fun to.

Gerry (50:08)

to

the new cycle. Yeah. Maybe something's there.

Host (50:10)

You got a backup plan here.

man,

that's so cool. OK, wait, we got to get back to your storyline here. so you're now the brand ambassador. Yeah. You got hired to be yourself. You said you did that for.

Gerry (50:26)

I did that for three and half years. Yeah. my, was funny cause my partner, she, she has a practice here. does body mind medicine. She's doing for 26 years and she has a practice in the Okanagan and she was living on the, with me on the coast at the time. And she was bouncing between starting a new practice out there for new clients. And back here.

with her existing 20 plus year of clientele. And at the same time she was, was away in Miami at a ⁓ psychology conference and she was coming back that and I got a call from my, ⁓ my ex-wife and she said, Hey, listen, the boys are going through some things and they

They really need you here more if you can. there any way that you could be here more to support them through what they're going through? And I was like, yeah, absolutely. Give me, give me some time to figure it out and I'll try to come back more. I was trying to come up here every weekend or at least bring them up there every weekend, but it wasn't always lining. So I was like, you know what? I need to go back and spend more time in the Okanagan. So was like, okay, I felt that pressure, but it was like, I felt that pressure, not from what she told me, but from myself to be like, okay, in the fatherhood role, it's like, okay, I have to be. And my

or everything my everything like I think it was ripping my soul out to be so far away from them and only see them like I would cry all the way back to Vancouver every time I left the Okanagan or vice versa if that was putting them you know on a plane back home I would just be bawling right it's tough I was having some trouble with that and I needed to get back here more for them and then ⁓ she called and said that and then immediately immediately like maybe a minute after she called

Rod Butters called me up and said, listen, I'm working on this cookbook. I really want you to be involved with Is there any chance that you can come back to the Okanagan more in the next month, month and a half? I want to get you in photo shoots. We want to get you working on the recipes, blah, blah, blah, blah. I really want you to be part of this collaboration. whenever chef says, Hey, I need you, I jumped to the pump because I love working with the guy. He's been one of my

co-conspirator collaborators for years. So I was like, yeah, okay. Yeah, absolutely. So I was like, that's really weird that, you know, two phone calls, like back to back or calling me to the Okanagan. And then, my partner came through the door from the airport with her bag. She just got back from Miami and she walks in the door and she's like, we got to talk first thing in her mouth. And I'm like, great. I'm getting dumped. What's going on here? And she's like, I can't do this anymore. I'm like, here it is. getting dumped. She's like, we need to move back to the Okanagan. I'm like, whoa. ⁓

She's like bouncing back and forth. feel like I don't really live anywhere because I'm in Kelowna for, you know, four days and I'm in Vancouver for three, then I'm back in Kelowna for a week and then I'm here for two weeks and I'm there for a week. So it's just, she's like, it's too much. The majority of my clients need me there. I've got steady business there. Can we consider moving back to the Okanagan? And of course at this time I smoked, so I was like, okay, I need to go have a cigarette. Like I can't even deal right now. So I walked outside.

lit a cigarette, the second I light it, my phone goes off. And it's my friend Megan, who I hadn't seen in years or talked to in years. And she says, Hey, listen, I know it's late. It's 9 37 at night. I don't mean to bother you. But I just have a quick question. Could you please give me a call? So I'm like, I haven't talked to Megan and like I see her here and there, but I haven't really talked to her in years. So I called her up. Megan, what's up? She's like, Look, I know this is out of left field, but

Do you have anyone or know of anyone that would want to move to the Okanagan for a really, really kick ass job? And I said, is it working with you? And she said, yeah. I said, yeah, me. She's like, shut up. like, yeah. She's like, I said, I'll do it. said, what's the job? She's like, I needed an interior rep for big rock. just came on as provincial sales director for big rock growing and I need somebody that I can.

Trust that's going to be a good fit for our team. I'm putting a new team together. And I'm like, I'm in. She's like, great. The national president is in town. Can you meet with them on Monday? It's my first day on Monday. I'd love to, for you to sit down with us. I'm like, yeah. So two weeks later, I was like having my exit dinner for Jack Daniels and I was signing on with big rock and moved back here to the Okanagan right away. Isn't that wild? That's why I went back in the house from having a cigarette saying, yeah, no problem.

Host (54:47)

I got goosebumps. That's why.

Gerry (54:53)

We can, we're out of here. We're out of here. so yeah, so I got to come back home and, be a stronger, stronger dad and help my kids through some tough, tough times that they were going through. And I got to, you know, appease my partner who was coming back to start her, re-engage with her practice. And I got to work with my co-conspirator Rod Butters on a, on a cookbook, a little bed and yeah.

Host (55:16)

It's weird how it all happened at the same time.

Gerry (55:18)

Yeah,

yeah. So I did that for another almost three years, four years. And then, ⁓ and this whole time, ⁓ even when I was in Vancouver, Dave and I had already started simps. So it was already a thing. It wasn't what it is today. But

Host (55:31)

Okay

yeah, let's backtrack here. Tell me how it started. How did it start and what was it like in those first days?

Gerry (55:40)

Well, we, ⁓

we, we found a way to big batch syrups. Like I came up with this idea when I was working at rods, where it was like, usually bartenders prep for the day or they prep for the week, but they don't prep for like the season. And since I was doing farm to table or field to glass cocktails, I wanted to be able to offer something like quince, for instance, quince in the Okanagan. There's very small yield of, of, places around here that grow quince, but

Host (56:05)

I don't even know what that is.

Gerry (56:07)

It's kind of like a cross

between I would say like, ⁓ kohlrabi and apple in a pear, but it's big and it's about the size of a softball and it's yellow and it's got a fuzzy exterior and it's really, really good when you poach it in vanilla. Yeah, it's a really cool fruit, but it only has, it only has, only has about a two week yield in here in the Okanagan. There's not a lot of people growing quince, but there's a, somebody out here has a hundred year old quince tree and we go and we would buy all the quince for the restaurant.

Host (56:20)

I've never heard of this before.

I'm loner too.

Gerry (56:36)

Every year it'd be like, okay, we're going to take all your quints this year. ⁓ so if I put a quince cocktail on the cocktail I only have a small window before I need to reprint that menu because they're, we're going to run out of quince. But if I go to the four places that actually grow quince in the Okanagan every year and say, I want to buy all of the fruit that comes off your quince trees. And I take that fruit and I take it to the kitchen at 4 a.m. before the restaurant opens at 11.

before the chef show up and I prep three months worth of quince syrup. And then I give what's left over to the kitchen or I make quince sugar. dehydrate all everything that's left or I give some of it to the kitchen to make a sorbet or an ice cream or a sauce. Then all of a sudden we use all of the fruit, the entire zero carbon footprint, like use everything. I now have a library of quince.

I now have a three month library of quints that I can do anything with. So those two weeks, two week window where most people in a restaurant be like, we only have quints for two weeks. Now I have three months of it. And so I started doing that with everything and with every farmer producer that I could. So, Hey, Irene from second wind farms, you have golden raspberries. We'd buy all the golden We want all of your golden raspberries this then I would take a large portion of that and I would be like, okay, I'm going to make.

six months of golden raspberry syrup. I'm going to make, you know, frozen.

Host (58:04)

And how you keep or is syrup.

I'm like, this is a lot of freezer space.

Gerry (58:09)

So I would have

a library and a walk-in freezer at Rod's. One wall of shelves that would have one liter Cambros containers, the plastic containers. And we would just make it in the morning and then freeze it. So eventually when I would roll out a cocktail program, I'd say to the bar team, okay, for the next four or five days, you got to be at the restaurant by between five and seven AM. I'm going to get there at four. You guys show up between five and seven. I'll have everything set. We're going to cook.

we're going to make the ingredients for this season's cocktail list. And we'd go through and we'd make everything from like stout reductions to, vinegar, syrups, shrubs, sous ving stuff, making anything and everything that we could. So suddenly we now have our library for the next four months. So once I got good at and started consulting and people were like, Hey, can you do, you know, but Carl, yeah, sure. So Dave and I would go into Baccaro.

showed Dave, Dave would come in and work with us. He didn't work at Rod's, but he would come in and help. And him and I became collaborators that And then Dave and I started doing this for other restaurants as well.

Host (59:13)

This is turning into like time-consuming game.

Gerry (59:16)

Majorly.

Yeah. Majorly, but effective and efficient. And something that you can bank on for three months. Like once the job is done, the job is done. Unless for instance, you know, we have one that's super popular and it either, you know, they just blow through it all because it's, you know, you get a big hit, you know, on your cocktail list, you have to blow through this all. But it was cool because now in October, I can offer that cocktail fresh, but also in April, when somebody comes back to the Okanagan, Hey, we're back.

We came up here in October. We met you. dined at Rod's. Remember that quince cocktail that you made? Is there any chance you might, I don't see it on the list here. It's like, you know what? Yeah, I got some. So you can go to the back, go to the library and be like, you know, I got six, six liters of quince syrup leftover from our last cocktail program. Or if there's a competition somewhere and they're like, Hey, we, you know, bring your secret weapons. Well, I had so many secret weapons that nobody else had access to it because I was doing stuff like that too.

Host (1:00:08)

And the Okanagan is like the perfect one.

Gerry (1:00:10)

The

for- Bounty, yeah, playground, right? So we got really good at big batching, what we call big batching syrups. So I'm with Jack Daniels. I'm at a golf The three people that I'm golfing one owns a chain restaurant, a group of chain restaurants in Calgary. His executive chef and his sous chef, like the three, the two top chefs in the company and this They have 74 locations.

So, so first day we play golf, nobody talks business. Second day we play golf, nobody talks business. 17th hole, we're waiting for to play on the 18th. There's some people on the green. finally, they finally get to shop talk. This appetizer is killing us because at happy hour we cannot pre-make them. We have to make them fresh to order and it's slowing ticket times. you think that's bad?

Host (1:00:34)

⁓ is this? Okay. I see where this is going.

Gerry (1:01:00)

What about this crazy decision that we made to switch to making all of our syrups in house? You tell me the owner says. All of a my ears perk up. I'm like the Grinch on the hill.

Host (1:01:10)

Hmm?

Gerry (1:01:12)

I'm just sitting there quietly in the back. like, you tell me why I'm paying a Red Seal chef at every location to sit and stir sugar water and add flavoring to it for three hours a day. It's killing us. And in the back, I'm now like, my Spidey sense, like everything's triggered. I just busted out my phone, which I'm doing right now. And I know

that this chain restaurant starts their chefs at 19.50 an hour. And then after three months, they go to 26.50 an hour. So I put in 26.50 an hour times three hours a day times seven days a week times 52 days a locations.

And I've got $2,141,412. ⁓

Host (1:02:04)

That number's a palindrome.

Gerry (1:02:08)

my gosh! The fact that you spotted that! Incredible! It is a palindrome! It's race car, it's taco cat!

Host (1:02:11)

I'm a mask.

There's that's weird. There's something so beautiful about symmetry. So I'm buying this motor so total quick tangent, buying a motorcycle off of a guy and he's bringing it next Friday. And when we settled on the total price, it was a pound. That's beauty in the symmetry. Anyways, let's go back. You're going to call you. Bring out your phone. You're punching in the numbers. That's a big number.

Gerry (1:02:19)

That is really odd.

symmetry.

I had a s-

I'm

like, that's a huge number. And then in my head, I run sugar costs. run leader costs. run labor costs. That's just labor. That's not ingredients. And I'm like, I can save these guys about Like I could do this for about

Host (1:02:49)

Right, because that's just labor. That's not...

Gerry (1:03:00)

Maybe 200, between 169,000 and 240,000, I can outfit them with everything that they need and save them over a million dollars a year on labor. Well over a million dollars a year.

Host (1:03:11)

What was it like standing there, having this realization or this epiphany and wondering how you're going to play it? Like how you're going to open, when to open your mouth and what you're going to say?

Gerry (1:03:26)

Well, in my head, I couldn't wait to get out of the golf cart. and in my head, I was like, thank God this didn't happen yesterday. Cause I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be in the car and I'd probably be back, back in the lab figuring out how do I pitch this? but luckily I was like the last hole. I didn't stay for the dinner. that's how excited I was. They would this big dinner and award show.

Host (1:03:46)

you didn't say anything you didn't say anything

Gerry (1:03:48)

There's this big room of prising so your table gets up and you get to go into this huge room and they've got iPads and ⁓ no wakeboards and ebikes and stuff that you can pick. And I was like, peace. I'm out. I don't need any of that. Cause I'm, I got a million concept right Wow. Like this is too So I raced out of there and immediately got to the parking lot and phoned Dave up and was like, dude, dude, I think we have a business.

And he was like, I think I can get investors. So we went, we got a couple of investors we pitched this to them and they said, yeah, we'll invest. but the first thing we want you guys to do is, is make your Caesar mix because your Caesar mix that we were making, we were making a Caesar mix for restaurants.

And we couldn't keep up and it, so we just stopped making it. They're like your Caesar mix. There's something with your Caesar mix. You guys should do that first. Cause you already have the recipe and it's ready to go and you know what you're doing. So we did our Caesar mix first and within two weeks we had 650 locations and stores buying our Caesar mix. Dave had a really cushy job where he was overseeing 44 different locations for a company as the beverage director. basically union like golden handshake at the end of his career could have retired there, but yet within two weeks he had to, he had to

quit and come on full time for production because we needed somebody to produce and, and make it happen. And that's where we started. Yeah. And then we, a year later, we bought out our initial brought on another person as our CEO. He was kind of advertised as an expert in scaling and he really to help us scale.

Host (1:05:07)

.

was gonna ask, what's that process like? cause you got to find a place. Yeah. And you're probably so familiar with kitchens and what you need. Sure. But then how do you go about finding your place and not knowing how big you're going to get? So like what size of

Gerry (1:05:33)

We

were 800 square feet with a 200 liter tank. And I was making commitments to like Boston pizza that I could have 130,000 liters of simple syrup to them a year. yeah, no problem. That's a lot. But I was like on the week one yeah, we can do it. Meanwhile, we're mixing out of a 200 liter tank. But I'm just like, my philosophy at the time, and I I've backed off a little on it, but

Host (1:05:46)

That's a lot.

Gerry (1:05:59)

Yeah. It was throw the bar as high as you can and then reach for it. Then go like play fetch with yourself. Right. Like go for it. Right. Like throw it as far as you got a good stick, throw it as far as you can and then race your ass off to try to catch up to it. And that's what we were doing. I was always biting off more than I could chew. Always over commit, over committing to the current reality. driving Dave, Dave and our other partners crazy like

You said yes to that. like, yeah, like let's go. Well, in my mind, it was are we doing this? Are we doing this? And I still am like that. It's like, I, I very much, that was, that was when I started getting like the dopamine hit of being of hustle culture and being like, okay, there is, there's something in me that loves this, that loves this relentless pursuit of the, of the golden bone or the golden ring. Right? Like I just need it. ⁓ my friend, they

Host (1:06:44)

I have so many questions.

Gerry (1:06:53)

they start calling me thinking referring to me as like the pit bull on the tire that won't let go on the rope string. Right. That's just like, ⁓ so if I got a lead that lead, wasn't getting, getting rid of me until I got a yes. Right. Yeah. I was like bringing it home.

Host (1:07:08)

So what was it like doing the pitch, your first pitch to them?

Gerry (1:07:11)

it was, it was, it was, it was good. It was, ⁓ it was new to me. totally undervalued our position. being that I was like, okay, we need to make it. We need to undercut the competition. There's no way that we're getting in the door unless we take out our competition, like hack them, hack them off at the knees. So, you know, we need to drop right below cost, right above cost, like barely, barely making it and get in there.

Just to, just to get the cosine. I really wanted a cosine and the first cosine that we got, well, I had conversations with Boston pizza that fell through that didn't happen. the first real cosine that we got, we got Joey, Joey restaurants international. ⁓ yeah. Wow. And so that was the first cosine that we got. That's huge. Yeah. That was big. They have, they have quite a few locations and now, now we still supply them to this day from.

here in Kelowna to Miami, to Texas, to all of California, all the California locations, all their locations across Canada. Yeah.

Host (1:08:12)

So now I'm assuming you have more than just one 200 liter mix.

Gerry (1:08:15)

Yeah.

So we scaled from there. We got some 1600 liter tanks. had mixers. We had all the stuff going. during COVID what happened was obviously the bars, restaurants and cafes all shut down and we're doing like pickup or delivery or door dash and skip kind of raise became a thing then. during that everyone started moving their cafe or bar into their home. So you saw a rise in Breville.

You saw a lot rise in Nespresso. we actually became the official partner of Nespresso during that time. Cause that was the, major co-sign that we got was like reached out, met, met our local rep was like, you're lovely. Want to work with you. I'm like, who's your, who's your syrups partner? And she's like, I don't think we have one. So I reached out through her, got the conversation going. And then, it became to this day, we're still the official syrups partner of Nespresso, which is kind of cool. No, super.

And they're super awesome to work with and super, super neat people.

Host (1:09:12)

So do you have issues now ingredients fresh with how big you are?

Gerry (1:09:19)

Well, now we use CO2 extraction. so it's more of an extract game. Now our we've, we've, moved away from the, from the production of, of raw material to, okay, let's lean into science because anything that you're doing with bio runs a major risk. So by when I say bio, mean, material. So for instance, if there's pulp in, what you're, what you're, what we're making, and we put that into clear bottle and you leave that in a window for three hours.

you're gonna get

And when you're shipping from Canada in an unrefrigerated truck all the way down to Miami 45, 50 degrees weather, you're going to get soup. You're going to get this, you know, mitochondrial mess when you get there. So we've, we've switched into, okay, let's, let's, let's lean on, you know, on science. Like we know flavor really well. Let's just lean in flavor and let's lean in development of flavor.

Host (1:10:12)

you know, we haven't touched on this yet because you must have a really a

Gerry (1:10:16)

I, I've been told, this isn't a humble brag or anything, but I've had my palette described by more than a few people as a photograph of photographic palette. I discovered that through big badging. So for instance, I would let somebody else do a day of prep where it's like, Hey, we need 600 liters of these three syrups. And they'd go in as a team and the four people would go in as a team while I did whatever else I was working on to batch the recipe. And I'd come in and it'd be like, no.

No, it needs more citric acid or it needs more citrus. And they'd like, how do know that? I'm like, no, I know that. Or the basil, what kind of basil did you use? Did you use Thai basil on this or purple basil? Oh, we use Thai basil. basil's off. Use a different variety of basil. Oh, it's okay. I can tweak it. Well, how are you going to tweak it? I can get it there. No, there's no, yeah. And then I'd fix it. And then we'd taste against the other batch. And they'd be like, these are a

identical and like you didn't measure a thing you went in there with sugar you went in there with different basil you went in there and added this to it and that to it and I don't know I don't know I just have a really interesting palette where it's like if I make you Thai a Thai soup if I made you a Tom Yum Kai today and Two years from now you come to me and say hey remember that Tom Yum Kai you made me a like yeah you want another bowl and What it would be identical it would taste the same

Host (1:11:18)

You're a potion master.

Because that's actually two things wrapped in one. Because you have the ability to know if it tastes the same, which is like the photographic thing. But then the knowledge, when it isn't the same, what do you do to tweak it to get it the same? It's its own thing. That's double, right?

Gerry (1:11:55)

Yeah.

Yeah. Like imagine seeing your dad without a mustache in a picture and with a mustache in a picture and somebody hands you the picture with the mustache and you're like, that's, that's my dad, but not quite. And they're like, well, how do we fix it? And I take the one with the, without the mustache and draw the perfect mustache or Photoshop the mustache back onto it and be like, no, that's my dad. Yeah. Like that. That's, that's a kind of weird analogy for it, but yeah, yeah. I have that really odd ability to, to notice that.

I went a graduation there. took my son out to a restaurant here in town and I had a meal I really thought it was amazing. And then yesterday I finally had an opportunity to get out of the office and catch a little sun yesterday for about an hour. And I was downtown and I was like in the North End. was like, I'm going go to that restaurant because I really enjoyed that dish. really like, I loved it. I'm to go back and have it. And I had it yesterday and I tasted all the differences.

Host (1:12:49)

I must drive you insane.

Gerry (1:12:51)

didn't change it. should like I was going to ask for seasoning and I was going to I noticed what was overcooked on it. I noticed. Oh, this is creaminess level, the umami level of the creaminess, the salt, like

Host (1:13:04)

It's like a privilege and a

Gerry (1:13:06)

Like I intrinsically knew that it was different while I was tasting this is, ⁓ this is, this is dulled. This is like, you know, this is muted. the chicken in this dish isn't seasoned up to where it needs to be. It's overcooked. The crust on the chicken is overcooked just this amount. And the salt level in the pasta is off. And so is the creaminess.

Host (1:13:28)

like Michelin star level.

Gerry (1:13:30)

It was weird. It's a weird one. I don't know where I get it from or how I do it, but I can take a commercial product. let's say that if you change the recipe for Coke tomorrow, I would notice. I notice when companies make tweaks.

Host (1:13:43)

Do you notice, ever have, ⁓ I used to drink Diet Pepsi a lot. will, shame, shame to say it, but whatever, is what it is. But there is a distinct difference in your canned Diet Pepsi is on where it was manufactured. Some of them have like 1 % and the other one has 2%. And you can taste it on the first sip if you know it's a good one or not. And it's just, it's like a completely different flavor. Completely different.

drives me wild. Then I think, how sad is that that I've drank enough of this over my life that you notice instantly.

Gerry (1:14:15)

Well, what about ice level? What about style of ice? What about vessel?

Host (1:14:21)

Yeah, it's gotta be. Well, then you know when you're talking about being the experience of the cocktail. Yeah I love that stuff. sometimes it's so expensive to get a cocktail from a certain place but it's not just the drink. It's the entire experience. Yes the ambiance of the place It's the feel of the glass. It's it is that like the type of ice. It's the smell. It's it's the whole thing

Gerry (1:14:44)

My philosophy was that you are you are you're staging a performance in some bit across somebody's palette and that performance has to then be chosen for their current experience and So if you come in and you're angry and you say I want this cocktail That might not be the one I'm prescribing you because that spirits gonna take you on a journey Then I have to pull back from that and look at the entire experience of the room

If I serve you that cocktail now, and it affects you in a negative way, what's the temperature of the room? Can the room handle you having that experience with everyone in it? And now I have to conduct the entire night's experience by playing that performance out in the right way with you so that you now can amalgamate into the rest of the room. And it gets you where the temperature of the room is, the energy in the room and the vibe.

Host (1:15:38)

like the energy of the.

Gerry (1:15:42)

So if you come in and you just had a big fight with your husband and you want a bourbon cocktail, because you're pissed off, I then have to make a judgment call on how that bourbon is going to affect you 45 minutes from now. And if it's affecting you negatively in a negative way, how is the impact of your behavior going to infiltrate and affect the rest of that room for the, you. After, and there's only a few of us that.

Host (1:16:07)

It's next level bartending.

I've never experienced that. That'd be a cool experience to have.

Gerry (1:16:12)

Think of it that way.

Right? Yeah.

So when it comes to a cocktail, the way that I plan it out is every ingredient is a character. What's the over what's the what's the story here? What story? What play are they putting on in in your mouth? Like what? then in turn in your body and then in turn, how was that then exhibited by you when the effect of that cocktail hits? Is this

Host (1:16:37)

kind

of like I'm not familiar at all with fine dining or anything but this is kind of um to go to a what do you let me rephrase this what do you even business that would be that level of bartending or that level of cocktail service and then have that experience it almost reminds me of some sort of like super fine dining you know those shows we watch on netflix that are really cool yeah it's kind of like that before

Gerry (1:17:01)

Yeah

There's an amazing Canadian guy, Frankie Slarek, and he's in Toronto and now he's got some bars in New York and he's also on Netflix on their bartending show. He really took it to the next level and he does these amazing, huge, molecular sort of, what's the word?

Not menagerie, what's the one where you build little rooms?

Anyway, he does these he does these almost like their their bento box experiences with some have like little trees growing out of them and ice and dry ice and but it's like it's that whole thing right where it's got like

coconut and seashells within the mist and you're getting sea salt mist while you drink it like he's got the full thing he's got an amazing bar called bar chef in Toronto but he's taken it to the next next next level like he's pretty it's an he's a really incredible creator ⁓ that I salute a lot because he's he's just a cool cool yeah it was that it's it's I don't know what that style of bartending is called but I know that yeah it can either it went when done well

it serves it serves its purpose. When done from an egocentric place, it fails completely.

Host (1:18:12)

What do mean by that? Ego centric place.

Gerry (1:18:15)

Bartending

became less about the tending of a bar and more about the cocktail. And I always say that cocktailing is what we do behind the scenes. Cocktail is me at 4 a.m. making the ingredients. Bartending is making sure that you are having the experience that is custom tailored to you for that moment and for that evening. So you know when you go, have you ever been at a bar when the bartender's like, yeah, so I made this, this is a Yuzu flip.

Host (1:18:35)

Who?

Gerry (1:18:42)

⁓ or they're using terminology that you don't know.

Host (1:18:44)

Absolutely. Right.

No, I've never let me just pause and think here. when you go up and actually sit at the bar on tall chairs. Yeah. OK, I've I've done that only a few times in my life, and it's usually just like like a crown on the rocks.

Gerry (1:18:59)

Sure. But a lot of times what we see nowadays and it's been happening for a long time is the bartenders have become many celebrities and they've gotten some hype, much like I did. They're no got some press, they've got some hype. And then suddenly they think that every guest wants to know about their creative process. Every guest is there to learn about them and their bar program.

Host (1:19:19)

It's

them instead of the gaff.

Gerry (1:19:20)

I've

got a barrel aged mother-in-law and like if you've had a mother-in-law before and it's like, no, maybe, maybe they don't, maybe they haven't, maybe they don't even know what you're talking about barrel age, what's barrel age, but you have these bartenders that make it all about their cocktail rather than your experience. I used a 3.2 saline dilution on this one just to give it that extra, you know, ⁓ that underlying.

Host (1:19:38)

Okay, I see what

Gerry (1:19:46)

balance of this and that and then I you know I I use the the minerality and this is from sous vide stones that I got from this Creek and Fort St. John and this and that and it's like okay thanks but like you know what I mean that's what I mean by egocentric bartending where they make it all about the cocktail and them and how brilliant they are and like all the steps that they did to do this rather than putting it in front of you and going here's guns and roses and then going

Host (1:20:16)

So where do you think right now in the city would be a good place to have an experience with a good bartender?

Gerry (1:20:22)

I think Mark Veraker at Fancy's is, is amazing. I think he's just a great classic bartender. He's a great barkeep. He's, ⁓ subtly, very subtly and very quietly, very creative. Okay. So.

Host (1:20:36)

So I should just

go there. Sorry to interject. Just go there and sit down. I don't even know how you order. Usually I just say, what drink do you like to make that you haven't made in a while? And that's what I drink.

Gerry (1:20:48)

If you like a classic martini, like a classic gin or vodka martini, he's a great guy for that. He makes just a great standard. Super clean, ice cold, well presented, just simple martini or cocktail. But there's lots of creative cocktail people in the city. Derek's Steakhouse is excellent. ⁓

Host (1:20:56)

You just sit for a while.

Gerry (1:21:08)

He's a major, major cocktail aficionado and he's a great guy and he really knows his stuff. He's one of those guys that really geeks out on the cocktails, like really like science and math sit up and really gets deep into the like mathematics of it. And the way that he, he presents the styles of his cocktails is really cool. I mean, there's there, there's a Harry dosange. If you're a bar traveling man, he's got some great influences from his family and from his culture within his stuff.

lot of Eastern influences that he brings to the table. Yeah, there's a lot of good, great bartenders in it's about that. It's about the guest experience. For me, it's all about, nicest, the top compliment I've ever received and continue to receive when I do put out drinks, the top compliment you could pay me is, you know what this reminds me of? You know what this reminds me of? And they say,

You know, they turn to their, their wife and they go, remember when we got married and we went to Europe and we were in France and we rented that loft for three days above that Parisian cafe. And every morning they would make those, apple cinnamon croissants. she's like, ⁓ my God, with the yeast. And you could smell it. And through the window in the morning when we woke up and we had to go down and get it. then, and then.

Host (1:22:21)

feel like this is a true story.

Gerry (1:22:25)

I would have mine with butter and you would have yours without and then we'd switch. Yeah. my God, this cocktail is totally like that. Yeah, but this cocktail is like that. If it's, it's kind of like, if they only had like a little bit of butter left on it and it kind of tastes like, and they start going into this memory.

Host (1:22:42)

Wait,

I have to stop you here. Was that a true story or was that a Jerry Dope story? I It felt like it was real. And then halfway through I'm like, wait, but maybe this is him doing the Jerry.

Gerry (1:22:52)

Yeah,

no, no, it's just no straight up. That's that's That to me is the greatest compliment. That's cool because I made that cocktail, let's say from a girl that I met at the IP in grade nine just before school got in. Then I met her in school that week because she was in two of my classes. Then I asked her if she was going to be at the fall fair. And then I went to the fall fair in Salmon Arm and she was there and she was standing in line for mini donuts and a

B was in her hair and I went and I got B out of her hair and then I built this cocktail all based on that experience. So it had to have cinnamon in it. It had to be yeasty and sweet. So I imparted those flavors into it to kind of capture a little subtle mini donut. And then I used honey instead of sugar to sweeten it because of the B in her hair and right all this stuff.

I have my own story that I've created, but I'm not sitting there telling you that story because it's robbing you of your own interpretation and experience of being transported back 16 years ago to your honeymoon in a loft in Paris.

Host (1:23:58)

I just had the

vision of like your story in this little bubble like in space in my mind and then it had all these like wisps going out to other bubbles of all the people who have tried your beverage and then it's just in this little universe of like all these things are connected. That's a weird visual but that's what my brain started.

Gerry (1:24:17)

And I've heard it all. These candies, these Dutch candies that my grandfather used to give me. my gosh. This is reminding me so much of my grandfather right now. my mom used to give us the, the, the stuff, cinnamon into our pillows at night so that we'd have a good sleep and it would smell good. It would like relax us or lavender.

Host (1:24:37)

That's about so

Gerry (1:24:38)

or

something like that, right? Or my dad used to use this, this grease, this hand grease to wash himself after get the grease off his hands and it had that smell or, you know, it's that transportative quality that I look for in a lot of stuff.

Host (1:24:52)

one thing I wish total side tangent like you know we have pictures to see visual we can hear voices if you record them but you can never capture a scent you know like ⁓ and so much of life is like that smell or that flavor like you're saying well it's it transports you to a

Gerry (1:25:11)

it's the number one sense, associated with memory and nostalgia. Yeah. Is, is scent. Yeah. It's actually how dogs tell time, believe it or not. They have two, holes at the back of their nose, like at the back folds of their nose, all dogs have two little holes there. And what that allows them to do is it increases their sense of smell by 400 compared to a human. So they tell time and distance.

Host (1:25:20)

Tell me more.

Gerry (1:25:37)

based on intensity of scent. So if you bake an apple pie and it's in front of the dog and the dog smells it and it's like, wow, that's a great look at apple pie. I wish I could eat that. And then you take it and you take you know, two kilometers down the road. They can tell how far it is by the strength of its original scent compared to where, where they're smelling it now.

Host (1:25:41)

Thank

Gerry (1:26:02)

And also how much time has passed since they left you and took it away.

Host (1:26:05)

That's wild. Crazy? Yeah,

didn't know that. did you learn that?

Gerry (1:26:09)

I heard on CBC. They this whole thing on CBC on, on. Yeah. Cause they were getting, people were getting them done. Humans were getting the back of their noses. There was a story about people figuring this out and being like, ⁓ I have no idea. I can't remember. I just was into the dog part of it. I was like, that's cool. That's how dogs tell time. that's how they know spatial distance. That's how, when you know, like.

Host (1:26:13)

Tidbits of life.

Yeah. like humans were.

And did it work?

That's it.

Gerry (1:26:35)

that this dog disappeared like two and a half months ago and went on this journey and ended up somewhere and then finally found its way home. Well, how did it find its way home? Didn't have a map. No, no. Right? that weird? Yeah. Okay. Anyway, side tangent, but no. Back to old factory, we have five, you know, five, six, you know, with umami and there it kind of gets, debated on how many, how many senses that we have or how many

Host (1:26:50)

It's good.

Gerry (1:27:00)

different styles of taste or flavor that we have. time you start think by the time you're 60 or 65, most of your taste buds start deteriorating down and down and down. That's why senior citizens tend to, can I get some more salt? Can I get some more pepper? Right? They want to like load Yeah.

Host (1:27:17)

I feel like that's already happening to me because

I just want all these flavors that were way too strong 10 years ago. I just turned 40, but now it's like the hoppiest beer, the...

Gerry (1:27:27)

Totally.

I went through a period, a distinct period of my life where I wanted my food to hurt me. I want Korean like every night and I want it to be like, want a Korean hot pot that makes all of my sinuses empty all over the table. I want to cry. I want the roof of my mouth scraped, like give me Captain Crunch or like, you know, something I toast, right? You know, want the top of my mouth scraped. I want to feel it. I want my teeth to hurt. I want to be crying.

Host (1:27:32)

I like what?

Gerry (1:27:54)

And feel like have a head cold. I went through this sadomasochistic, sadofoodochistic. Of age thing. Where I was like, no, I want my food to hurt me. And I was worried. So maybe it was that period where I was going to, but that deteriorates over time, but you have over 140,000 olfactory sensors in your nose, right? In your sense of smell. And if all of those are connected to your sense of nostalgia or memory, the strongest.

Host (1:28:00)

Was this like 10 years ago? you 40? Okay, so maybe it's just a coming

Gerry (1:28:22)

then as a creator who plays in those fields, you lean into those. Yeah. Right. But then it's then it's knowing that just like in taste where you're like, hey, lobster's red, cherries are red, ketchup is red. Let's put it all together because that should make sense. No. They're all red, but they don't taste good together. Right. So you got to know which ingredients are going to play well together.

Host (1:28:40)

Officer, no.

Gerry (1:28:49)

And especially when you have an overarching story or experience that you want to share silently without telling the audience what that story is. But if you start there, if you start with that story, they're good. They're going to come with you. They're going to, they're going to find some element in there that appeals to them or resonates with them from their own experience because you've used the aromatics, right? You've used the flavors, right? You've used the right amount of salt or citrus or saline or whatever you're using.

to craft that own story and some part of that maybe it be one or two elements in that in in your own personal story they're going to connect with and overlay that on something that they've had in their past because you've gone for nostalgia you've gone for the memory you've gone for that you're shooting for that yeah

Host (1:29:34)

I got a question about your creativity in your syrup making, like dabbling with new flavors. ⁓ Is it

Wait, I don't know what you call it in the cooking world where you have where you do you want to develop a new flavor so you're Developing it. But then do you have to develop that flavor and then transfer it to the new way of making it? you actually yeah

Gerry (1:29:59)

Yeah. So

what we do is we do, we do a spectrum with our lab. So what we'll do is we will create it raw in house. So I will go like, let's say it's a, it's a rhubarb syrup. Okay. It's rhubarb season. I love rhubarb too. And it's on my hit list to actually make rhubarb syrup and apricot. You've got a beautiful apricot tree in front of your house. Like apricot is one of my favorite flavors to play with apricot and yellow curry in a cocktail.

Host (1:30:18)

We harvest the entire thing.

Gerry (1:30:26)

It's fantastic. I made one years ago called Apra Kadabra and it was apricot and it was a curried, a curried apricot. Yeah. Cool. Syrup. And it was absolutely delicious. That's amazing. Yeah. those types of flavors, like, so let's say that you're doing that. So you wanted a certain viscosity. You wanted a certain intensity. You want a certain level of sweat sweetness. You might want a certain level of acidity to

What we would do is we would play around with it until my palette says, yeah, this is great. Like stop.

Host (1:30:58)

You are the quality control here.

Gerry (1:31:01)

They kind of throw it to me. They've kind of said, okay, you know, like we all taste it. We all debate it. But then at the end of the day, they're like, okay, like, Joe, what do you think? Okay, what about this one? And I'm like, Nope, stop. My business partner Dave calls says that I'm making soup. He's like, ⁓ job's making soup again, because I'll do 20 liters of something. Yeah, and add this or move that add this and that no Just all mentally like, okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, got it. And I'll just take little notes of how much. Okay, no, I've added two more ounces of that or I made

Okay. Doubled that up. I've just got a working notepad next to me for all the changes, just so we can clock it. So when we actually give it to the lab, they can go, how did you reach this? And how much of that did you use? I'm like, yeah, well, I changed it by this much. Right. But really on the fly, like really like, okay, no, it's not quite there yet. Stir, taste, stir, taste, or, wait, no, we over, we overdid it. Bring it back, draw it back, draw it back. Okay. Don't you think it needs this? Yeah. Okay. So once you make your soup and then you scale it,

You go, okay, let's send that to the lab. So we'll bottle it. We'll send it to our lab. Now the labs in We work or five different labs, but the in-house lab at our production facility is the one I'm talking about specifically. So what they do is then they go, okay, the median is exactly what they sent in. So they take what we've done and they make it food safe and shelf stable for up to a year.

Host (1:32:02)

Like where is your

Gerry (1:32:23)

Okay, this can withstand heat in a back of a truck in Miami. This isn't going to twist. There's no bio in it. It's not going to get, it's not going to go spoiled on a grocery shelf. It's not going to hurt Okay. Cause that's really a base one day one started my job walking in the door every day is don't kill anybody. ⁓

Host (1:32:42)

There, that's good idea.

Gerry (1:32:44)

So once we have that food science down and that safety down, then they go, that's the medium. That's exactly the level of acidity, the level of sweetness, the color, the flavor, the body, viscosity. And they're testing that they've done an age accelerated growth stage. They'll put it into, know, a centrifugion heat it. They'll do all sorts of stuff to show how, where, it could break down, where we could get issues with growth mold, anything like that in the future.

So let's really rigorously test this thing and make sure that it's going to be okay for consumption on a large scale. Then what they do is go, hey, just for giggles, this one, we'll make another one on the other side that has higher acidity, higher sweetness, and then we'll make one that's really sweet and really acidic. And then we'll go on the other side and we'll make one that's less acidic and less sweet and then really less sweet, really less acidic. And then they'll send us

those five bottles back and go, here's the median, here's sample one, two, three, four, five, six. Then we can turn around and go, okay guys, let's find out which one we like best. We've taken our shot at it, we all agreed that we love that one, but here's both sides of the coin. Here's the extension of those flavors in both directions.

Host (1:34:00)

Do you get better shelf life on either?

Gerry (1:34:02)

You can.

Absolutely. That's a very good question because some of those, if you go less, let's say, but we like the flavor more like, you know what? I kind of like it when the, when it's muted like that. But now that shelf life is only six months. So then we might go back to them and go, Hey, can you do a combination of two and, and five? We love the acidity level of two, but we want the sweetness level of five. We also want it to be shelf stable for a year. Is this doable? And they'll go, yeah.

Here you go. Here's sample seven comes back and then we look at it and go, okay, let's taste that against our original and see where we're at. And when we taste those two, we're like, you know what? It's not quite the original, but I know that I really, really liked the fact that it's not cloying at the back of my palate, that I don't get the pinch of the sour on the side of my jaws. And with every sip, I think that was a little too tart.

And this mutes that tartness, but still keeps the sweetness. And it's got a really cool, interesting balance going on between the two. So we're going to go with that one. So we might, may step away from that initial sample that we sent because the lab then has challenged us to look at the whole picture of what it could be or what it shouldn't be, what it should be or what it shouldn't be on either side. And sometimes we go, yeah. for instance, we do do that with a, with a client like, like Joey, for instance.

We made a fresh Okanagan mint syrup. we collected a 1600 pounds of mint from the Okanagan and made that into an extract, a food safe extract, but still had that swampy kind of back note of the Okanagan mint in it. And we designed that for Joe. We made them a really intense syrup and we sent it to the lab and we're this is what we want. Cause we thought they're only going to use a hint of this in the cocktail. They actually went for the weakest one because their bartenders are trade to use.

Host (1:35:53)

⁓

Gerry (1:35:56)

pour everything by the ounce. Not a half ounce, not a quarter ounce, and out. So they wanted as simple as possible to train their staff across all of their chain. So like one ounce of this, one ounce of that, one ounce of this, shake.

Host (1:36:09)

they're actually even though so now they're paying for because your volume is now double the amount that you got to ship to them but that's that's still you're saving money to the training of your stuff

Gerry (1:36:20)

Yes. And also saving money on the next time that we have to go buy 1600 pounds of mint to make a massive batch of this extract. But, it's what they want. And it's how they've designed their cocktails. So yeah, that's cool. It's a weaker syrup, but they're using more of it so that they can have a standardized measure. Which makes sense. So every client's different, right? Sometimes we put something in front of the client. We'll put three samples in front of them and then we'll get a whole bunch of notes back from them. Yeah. It was great. The cherry was cool.

But could you add a little cherry blossom to it to make it aromatic? Because it's getting lost in the bottom of the sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No problem. So it's those kind of notes.

Host (1:36:58)

So do you try to keep all of your syrups, because your syrups are all in kind of the same size thing. So do you try to keep them all relatively the same concentrate so that people, if you're moving from one flavor to the next, it's still the same amount that you're in.

Gerry (1:37:13)

We try

for the most part. We're usually a five to one concentrate or a few, pardon me, a few of ours are a four to one concentrate. So what that means is like a Monon or a Turani are either a one to one concentrate, one sugar, one part sugar, one part water, or a two to one concentrate, two parts sugar, one part water. Ours are five to one. So five sugar to one water, really thick, really viscous.

And the reason why is that sugar, much like salt is a flavor enhancer. is like a magnifying glass for flavor. So if you want something sweet and flavorful, you can part a lot of sugar into it. That's going to lift it up and that's going to make it stay on the palette, play on the palette. But for us, coming from a bartending background, when we first started designing syrups, we would run viscosity tests all the time and just time bottles pouring out.

⁓ how long did it take for that Toronto bottle to pour out versus how long did it take for our syrup to pour out? Okay. And we really balanced that out to make sure that our viscosity and our thickness of our syrup would then translate from a bartending perspective or a barista perspective is when you put that into a coffee. Does it just disappear? How does this syrup stand up against heat? How does it stand up when you, when you constrict it by shaking it over ice? How does it then open up in the cocktail? we.

Make a cocktail with our syrup and let it sit for 20 minutes and taste it and make notes every like five minutes Okay, now the room now it's reach room temperature

Host (1:38:39)

Bye.

that resin. Because when you have it in coffee you don't want to have to be sitting there stirring it in forever. all these little nuances. This is probably a side question just because I'm a bit ignorant on the matter but what is the difference between the syrup and and those little tiny bitters?

Gerry (1:39:02)

Bitters are basically an extract that's been made with alcohol to draw out flavor from something and a bittering agent. So bitters are more like your salt, your pepper, your spices. Bitters would be like a spice rack.

Host (1:39:16)

Because when you buy your bitters or your jar of a bitter and you add it, you add like one or two drops. Okay.

Gerry (1:39:23)

Yeah, yeah, it's like seasoning.

Right. So like a syrup would be like the sauce. And then the bitters would be like the the spices that seasonings that you put in the sauce to make it pop.

Host (1:39:34)

I

And then it's just like super highly concentrated, whatever.

Gerry (1:39:40)

Yes.

And bitters literally are like based on gut health and tonics and elixirs, that kind of background. So, roadside barker, you know, I got tonics, you got the vapors, you got a bad case of the vapors, come see me, I got the cure-all, right? Yeah, that's literally where our extracts come from. They come from that. ⁓ Town to town guys with briefcases on a shoebox standing in the middle of the town going, folks, do have a creaky leg?

Host (1:39:59)

That's where it comes from.

Gerry (1:40:10)

Tickin' ticks and ailments. You gotta case the vapors, come see me.

Host (1:40:14)

Get out! ⁓ wow!

Gerry (1:40:16)

Your

son looks like he's got a hobble. He's got a bum leg. Come see me. I got this cream. got that. It's that. That's how it started.

Host (1:40:22)

⁓ I did not know the history of that.

Gerry (1:40:25)

Yeah,

that's bitters. ⁓ cool. That's bitters all there. Tonics and bitters for digestion. Digestion, all your gut. Right? So they would take all of that, extract it into alcohol and make you the cure-all. yeah. is where you get the snake oil salesman term, right? It's all these guys going town to town saying they got the cure for whatever. And now it's just like, that methodology was like, hey, look, I'm not having my stomach's really upset today. just...

Host (1:40:45)

And now it's just a flavor in it.

Gerry (1:40:54)

put some egg a stir and some ginger, ginger and there you go. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, 270 new locations, but it's been me harassing the poor guy at, at Sobeys and Safeway for the to four years, every Tuesday at 11 AM. Seriously, like every Tuesday sit down. First thing I do is, Hey Gary, is it time yet? How are sales? Here's all our requests. Finally, what I did to push it through was I went and I took all the screenshots of everyone.

Host (1:41:23)

you

Gerry (1:41:30)

every comment on our social media over the last two months asking for Alberta. ⁓ and it compiled into a gigantic collage and sent it to him. little demand Yeah.

Host (1:41:39)

Wow.

I you said that earlier. You don't stop till you get the yes, right?

Gerry (1:41:44)

Right. Yeah. And then also consistency, you have an alarm that goes off at 11 o'clock every Tuesday, you you're Pavlov's dog, right? Yeah, it's Pavel. Right. So I'm like, yeah, you know what? I'm not going to harass him all the time. I'm going to harass him one day a week at one time until he eventually says,

Host (1:42:05)

Did you ever miss a Tuesday and he like check in? ⁓

Gerry (1:42:08)

You

okay? No, he's probably like, I hope I hope something tragic happened to that guy. Yeah, it worked. So yeah, so we've, we've grown a lot over the years. And like now that we have we lean into science, we've got a really awesome collaborative co packer out of Vancouver that understands the assignment. When we interviewed people to take on our recipes, we were like, they're like, oh, we got a vanilla syrup. It's like, no, no, you

Host (1:42:15)

Well, I'm

Gerry (1:42:37)

You have a vanilla syrup. You don't have our vanilla syrup. don't understand what it is when a restaurant comes to us and says, we need a grapefruit jalapeno syrup for 80 locations or a restaurant. Can you do it? And then I turned to you and then, and you go, well, we got this old grapefruit neon, orangey pink, grapefruit syrup that we made 23 years ago during the heyday of the nineties or whatever. And we could dust that off. And it's like, no, no, going to send you a bottle.

of exactly what they And I need you to replicate that and make it food safe and shelf stable. And then I need to turn around and have them pleased by And right. Yeah. Yeah. So, so now that we got that and they can do the volumes, we've actually forced them to expand. ⁓ so now they have to get more tanks and more equipment. wow. Yeah. That was the last conversation. They're like, you guys forced our hand. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Go pause. Yeah.

Host (1:43:13)

you got such a cool-

I want to say something because I just think you have amazing voices and this little Jerry drob thing like I think you should run with this you can advertise ⁓ each one of your flavors can be a different you can play a different character yeah and then advertise it like it'd be so

Gerry (1:43:43)

DIRT DIRT!

Funny enough, our brand book this year is called Class of 26. Yeah. And they're all characters. They've all got high school photos in there with other ones signing beneath them. ground sugar cinnamon is the most likely to end up in this, in a mocha, or most likely to this, right? ⁓ that's hilarious. pistachios, like class clown, da-da-da, super popular this year. Pumpkin Spice is a full layout as a ⁓ statement from the valedictorian.

And this goes out to all our accounts.

Host (1:44:15)

⁓ I

love it. Yeah. it's so cool.

Gerry (1:44:18)

Literally that's this year's ⁓

Host (1:44:21)

This

is such an amazing, how your life has taken all these twists and turns and you're now in a job where it all just comes together, all your strengths and your loves and your passions kind of, you can play with it all.

Gerry (1:44:34)

It's create your own career. yeah, really have created our own career. There's the. So 26 and it's all done up with the leather binding and then. The valedictorian, right? It's got the cap in the gown and it's like, yeah, so they're on and then they're going to be leaving each other notes. don't do what I would do the summer or whatever. Brown sugar, cinnamon or like pistachio or whatever it is.

Host (1:44:44)

That looks

i think i agree

Gerry (1:44:59)

Yeah, we've we've really Dave and I have really created our own career and it's an amalgamation of all of our skills that we've learned from back in the days when we were daydudes at the Roxy. Yeah. Right. Or Fred's Uptown Tavern or whatever. Babalu. Right. Like it's all that. OK, what did you learn there? What did I learn in marketing when I worked with neutral because I worked for neutral for for quite a while and worked with Paul Meehan and his amazing creative

And saw that go from zero to, 60 overnight and been part of that, meteoric rise of a brand in our, our, our national atmosphere. So now that that's kind of happening to us, I've, I can lean back on it and go, you know what? Yeah. I noticed this at neutral. Dave,

a lot of the negative comments towards our company now that we're in the social sphere. They're new to them, right? They're, he sends it and he's like, look at this guy. Look what he said about us. I said, buddy, this is nothing. You wait till we're years from now where we're really that national brand. like just multiplies, man. You're going to have deal with all of that. Right? Cause I've, I've been through that with neutral. saw that happen with neutral.

I've seen these things. I've had these past experiences. So we bring that to the table and we think about that when we do our marketing or social media and yeah, I've had that it's an, just we're, we didn't go to business school, right? I didn't go to business school. Dave didn't go to business school. We're two bartenders that had a lot of success bartending and then just kind of are doing something bartending ⁓ adjacent now, right? That is kind of neat and different and it's still creativity and flavor.

And now I often look back now and ask myself in my, in my head late at night was a stare at my ceiling. Was it the art of the flavors and playing with that and nostalgia and pop culture and memory through that I loved about bartending or wasn't the bartending.

Host (1:46:56)

and what do you- what do you- have you come to a conclusion?

Gerry (1:47:00)

No,

not yet. but I don't drink anymore. Yeah. I can still make you an amazing cocktail, but I don't drink anymore. And so I wasn't really do I know the differences in spirits and what they will do to your personality and the state that you're in right now? If you sat across from me and which one I'd actually prescribe to you to fit into a grander scheme of a room. Yes, I can still do that.

Host (1:47:21)

when I drink. I get like super smiley, but very calm and relaxed. I just like feel good. And huggy. I get huggy.

Gerry (1:47:31)

You know, I

would take your temperature on that and see where you wanted to go. If you're out celebrating, you know, your husband's promotion, you probably wouldn't want to be that mellow. Or maybe you would.

Yeah, so it's a really cool, fun experience. And now like we just hired our 12th person. In three months, three, four months. So we've got a night team now. for me, the bonus for all of this is providing with the support of the public in Canada, supporting us, this small two man small business that now is boomed to a 12 person business. We've hired

Most of the people that we've hired are all service industry. most of them have either run or owned their own business or restaurant within the service industry. Or are, gold in that. So they get the hospitality aspect behind it. And I always say we're not a syrups company, we're a hospitality company. Right? If I send you the wrong bottle, that's like me bringing you chicken when you ordered steak.

We have a duty of care that's built in for the last 30 years where that really drives us crazy if we don't fix that. Right. So it's like we got to hustle now to make sure that you get what you want. Yeah. And the way that you want it and that you're pleased and that you'll come back and visit us again. And we hope you do because we genuinely altruistically want that.

Host (1:48:37)

Yeah. that's

You must get such a kick out of everywhere in the city as your syrups, all the coffee houses. you don't see it? Everywhere I go. because you're working too hard.

Gerry (1:48:59)

Don't see it.

We're

living the brand. Yeah. All right. Like we're in the bubble.

Host (1:49:06)

Like, because

I did every I'm like, what I everywhere I because I just started getting into like craft coffee, I guess. And now whenever I go to a coffee house, there they are. There they are. And then I took my mom and my mother-in-law to a cocktail making thing. And they had your some syrup. ⁓ this is so cool. And you're around the corner.

Gerry (1:49:15)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

That's cool. Yeah.

Yeah. It really hits us. My therapist always says, is any of this landing with you? Cause I always tell her like, oh, and then we got these 270 new stores in Alberta and we've got this new deal with this new chain restaurant and we created this new syrup and we've sold like, it's been going like crazy. she's like, what? No rewind. Did you say you got 270 new stores in Alberta? I'm like, yeah, yeah. A couple of weeks ago. She's like, how are you not patting yourself on the back?

You have to wake up and somehow find a way to pat yourself on the back on some of this. Like is any of this landing with you? And I'm like, no, but like when somebody sends in a picture and I get excited, like, where's that display? They're like, Chilliwack. I'm like, Hey, we're in Chilliwack. Like who knew? But we've been there for like three, four years now, five years now, but I don't know. Cause like I'm too busy working on the next.

Host (1:50:22)

So

one of your employees, you can a nap, of not just Canada, because North America now, and just put a pin in all the To actually visually see it tangible.

Gerry (1:50:29)

places we're in yeah

Yeah. And it's funny too, we had, some influencers do a spotlight on our stuff. And, we were getting, you friends from Australia, New Zealand messages, dude, dude, I subscribe to these two, this podcast, or I've watched these guys all the time. we just, we're all celebrating over here because you guys showed they used your syrup and it's that kind of stuff that resonates. That's cool hit for me.

When someone else is getting a kick out of seeing our success, you know, whether it's my mom, like my mom went into a store last week and she phoned me up. She's like, I was at this store today. She named the store. I won't name the store, but she's like, and they were selling your vanilla syrup for $19 and 99 cents. Can you believe that? And I'm like, yeah, mom, hey, we don't control the pricing at store level. they decided to sell that much. Well, and then I was upset because they only had one bottle left. And I said, well, mom.

Host (1:51:27)

You

Gerry (1:51:28)

Do

the math here. We don't sell one bottle. We sell a case. So if we sold them a case minimum and they were selling it for $19.99 and there's only one bottle left, selling it for $19.99. It's moving. So I can't really argue with that. She's, oh yeah, I guess so. But like when she sees something that's like my mom and I are like two peas in a pod. I love her to death. She's like my best friend. I'm such a mama's boy. Unabashedly a mama's boy.

Host (1:51:40)

They're selling it.

Gerry (1:51:56)

but I wouldn't be here without her support. So I talked to her every night and she's always got some sort of insight. She always wants to know the numbers or what we're at for the day. She'll FaceTime with me at work so she can see Dave. Yeah. So when other people are getting a kick out of it, that's when it kind of resonates with me. That's when it's like, ⁓ okay. You know, we had a reality TV star that I don't know, put in an order the other night through our

Host (1:52:08)

So.

Gerry (1:52:22)

One of our staff, Ty, ⁓ he's our night guy, one of our major night guys at the shop. He sent us a picture of the, of the label, the shipping label. And he's like, ⁓ and we're like, cool. Who is that? And then we find out that she's this massive reality television star. And the next thing you know, I'm like reaching out to her online going, Hey, thank you. Like, that's really cool. So the fact that

They're getting excited and you know some more of our staff some other members of our staff knew who she was and we're like, ⁓ my no way. This is so cool that's really interesting right thought who would have thought I literally I say this in all and can ask dave you can ask our initial investors I just wanted to get our caesar mix onto a shelf at grocery so that I can bring my kids in there and I actually have the picture Of my kids standing

Host (1:52:57)

It's so exciting.

Gerry (1:53:16)

in front of our first Caesar display at a store and me being like, your dad did something cool. We made something. Me and my buddy got together. We made something and it made it on shelf. Isn't that cool? I'm good. Wrap it up. Like, yeah, let's go. I'm going to go be a lawyer now or I'm going to go do it.

Host (1:53:36)

You're right. You're not becoming a

Gerry (1:53:38)

a lawyer.

You know what I mean? Like, I hope this does well. I hope that people like it. you know, yeah, but now it's like, no, no, like, it's been 11 years of our life, but 11 years that have also we've also been doing other things during those.

Host (1:53:46)

hasn't ⁓

⁓ How many years full time with this?

Gerry (1:53:58)

and I are now going into our fifth year of doing this full Wow. doing it. Yeah. It's, and, you know, the one thing that we get called on out on a lot, and it just so happened to coincide with the whole, bi Canadian movement and the whole backlash to the tariffs and the whole elbows up thing that really kind of put the spotlight on our little company.

was that we've always had that as intrinsically as part of our messaging. Our first five or six social media posts were all celebrating Canadian artists. think our first one might've been like Brian Adams, Daniel Negrano from the poker world, Avril Lavigne, Gowan. I did a spotlight, I think our fifth, we didn't even say anything about our Caesar mix. didn't, I don't think we even showed our Caesar mix. We just spotlight, started doing spotlights on Canadians and Canadian performers.

Number seven was like a, this massive tribute to Maestro, fresh West and his contribute contributions to Canadian hip hop. then, ⁓ we ran ads that were like all Canadian and the tagline was, you know, it's what we're made of. And I've been running those for the last, eight Canada days. It's been our post, you know what I mean? comparing our Caesar mix to MOTS and USA to Canada and really being that, I mean, that's kind of what we did as our, as our.

social media voice was, you know, always with the hashtag buy local support local made in Canada bike sport Canadian. even at grocery six, seven years ago, our first things were Canadian coffee, syrup support local, right? Simps and right. and then when all of this kicked off, we joined the, I joined us to sign us up for the made in Canada group where they had 264 members. And I posted one sims ad about our Canadian syrups that was already running.

comparing us to American brands. It was already out there for a few weeks, but I posted it on the maiden cat. I was like, this is a new group. I'm gonna post this up. posted up the next morning. They had 1.4 million members. Well, the fastest growing Facebook page in Facebook history.

Host (1:55:59)

Holy smokes, yeah?

Gerry (1:56:01)

And then all of a sudden the orders that my phone didn't shut up. It was ding ding ding ding ding. Our online store. We weren't prepared. We didn't have the staff. Dave was in Ontario harvesting maple syrup at the time. I was sitting at the shop. Before he left, he turned to me and said, we got to ⁓ some sales in the next nine days while I'm gone or we're not going to make we had no problem making payroll after that. It was like, how do we find more people? How do we find more product? Because we're out.

we're dry now and we got to like production can't keep up. And so it was navigating the hit of all that spotlight. But the funniest thing that came with that is, well, aren't you guys suddenly patriotic?

Host (1:56:42)

There's always something

Gerry (1:56:45)

yeah, well, you're just jumping on this. All blah, blah, blah, blah. You guys are just trend hopping from one thing to the next. It was the same thing when we when we when we were selling non alcoholic spirits and non alcoholic stuff. ⁓ we're non alcoholic beverage boutique in the middle of the brewery district. It's kind of weird, but we've been there for over five years selling these things. But like, what a year and a half ago or two years ago, one of the local papers, when the whole

World Health Organization, you should only have two drinks a day thing came out. They did a story on us and the headline was local company jumps on trend on non-alcoholic trend or something like that or capitalizes on like it was like.

Host (1:57:26)

It was really like, and I'm like, ⁓

Gerry (1:57:29)

I'm

like, yeah, now if you had come in our shop over the last three years when we first started selling this, when no one was coming in the door.

Host (1:57:37)

Can I share something about that line? So one of the things about this podcast is where the idea kind of started. So I had a situation, not a situation, I had an experience with a local.

Gerry (1:57:39)

Yeah.

Host (1:57:53)

It's not newspaper, local news outlet. And I was a part of, I was a part a charity back in the day and they came and they did a write-up on the event. Yeah. Very kind of them. Very nice. then the write-up was all positive. It was fine. Yeah. But when you read it, they put verbatim, they put in quotes stuff that I said, but no one ever interviewed me. And so they were putting stuff in our write-up and I'm like,

I didn't say any of that. It's all and what they said was all nice. It was all fine. But I'm like, didn't I no one talked to me. No one talked to the other lady. And I thought, and it just it's has sat with me for so many years. And every time now when I read articles, I'm like, is this actually what's going on? Or is this just somebody just writing? so part of the podcast was, I want to hear the stories of

local business owners from their voice. No one's writing it for them. No one's taking little bits here and bits there and making their own thing out of it. I want to hear the story raw just from you, you know, and just

Gerry (1:58:56)

Yeah. Yeah.

Uncut, unfiltered.

Host (1:59:01)

yeah, no one, no one's adding to it or taking away, right? Like it's your moment to share your story and it can get out there from you. ⁓ That that's kind of was So I've had that. Yes, but it, and mine wasn't even negative. They were saying positive stuff, but the feeling I still carry that with you. So to have an experience that you went through then to.

Gerry (1:59:12)

Yeah. We've had that experience where it's like.

Host (1:59:26)

but they slanted it kind of negatively.

Gerry (1:59:28)

Yeah, they were like, you know, ⁓ company jumps all over new trend or something like that, tried to capitalize, capitalizes on a new trend. ⁓ like, how about you come and talk to me about the three years that no one walked in our front door. Yeah. And you're talking about two guys that, you know, whether people like me, whether, whether people hate me, whether they like Dave or dislike Dave, we've really put on for, for our people.

Host (1:59:36)

No, not cool.

Gerry (1:59:54)

I was one thing you can't take away from Dave and I whether you like us or not. We've really put on for our people. We've hooked our friends up with jobs. We've hooked strangers up with jobs. We coordinated coordinated events for people we've given to charity. We've done all this stuff quietly, because we don't clout chase and we don't. That's not part of who we are. But we've put on for our community. We've put on for people. You haven't seen us when we were sitting there with $27 days at our shop. You know,

Host (2:00:21)

Yeah, in the grind.

Gerry (2:00:23)

Yeah.

You don't know the hours that we've put in. You don't know the time that I've had to spend away from my kids during their developmental years because him and I were making this stuff 21 hours a day and sleeping on the floor and getting up four hours later to do it again, just to keep up, just to get this thing going and keep it going. The sacrifices that we've made, the financial hardships that we've had, the living in our vehicles type of lifestyle that we've had that we've kept quiet. Right? Yeah. Right. The mental health struggles that I've been through, the hospital

times that I've been in the hospital, more times than I can count. You know, the injuries that Dave has sustained and worked through not being able to, you know, walking on it, rolling around our shop on a knee cart every day because he's, his foot's, his foot's out of commission for three months. Right. We don't, we're not, we're not advertising any of that. But when we do put something out and for somebody to turn around and be like, ⁓ no, look at these guys. It was just like, come on.

Host (2:01:17)

from your own.

Come on, let's support each other and bring each other up.

Gerry (2:01:22)

Totally. Right. And nor are we looking for pity or any of that in it. But just like if you're going to get, if you're going to come talk about us, just come find out about us. Right. Like if you're going to bash us on social media, cool. I can hide your comment. I've got a thick skin. I, and plus, like I said to Dave, I've seen this all. Yeah. I've seen this happen to other people's companies that I've worked for and how they've handled it. So at least I have that experience with it. But this is great because I get to sit across from you. It's not an airing airing of grievances or griping.

Host (2:01:37)

I used to a very thick

Gerry (2:01:50)

It's just an honest unfiltered conversation about the reality is is that we've spent the last 11 years Going through some pretty serious up and down ups and downs in our lives both personally and professionally, you know, the main thing at the end of the day is that I've I get to go to work with with my friend and we get to be creative every day and now I get to see the kids of our employees go and get braces because we've contributed to them or start a soccer

team and be able to do day camps because I know that payroll is my favorite day of the month. two times a month it happens, payroll. And I get so excited because Canada has supported us and our community has supported us. And that we can then turn around to our staff and be like, now we can bring you on.

Host (2:02:37)

Yeah, it's like the small businesses is what makes the city the city.

Gerry (2:02:41)

Well, what was it 95 % of Kelowna is independent businesses and 90 % of people in Kelowna work for an independent business. We are truly a community of entrepreneurs. We have to and it's so silly, you know, it's so silly to hear anybody talking ill of somebody trying something new. Yeah, right. Like there's ideas that are good and ideas that are bad. Sometimes they go, ⁓ you know, like.

Host (2:02:52)

Yeah, we got to support each other.

Like your what was it lobster cherry

Gerry (2:03:09)

Yeah, yeah, they're all red. It should make sense there. They're all red. So they should taste good some ideas I scoff at go, I wonder how they're going to do with that. And I'm sitting there eating crow and eat put my foot in my mouth because it's a massive success afterwards that I'm like, Wow, really? That's the thing that public wants. And that but then I integrate that and it changes my way of thinking. But we love collaboration. There's lots of other brands that we help support.

in this town that we, I wouldn't say mentor because they're very smart, intelligent business owners, but we definitely help out with share the spotlight for free. We don't take anything from other people.

Host (2:03:46)

That's what this podcast is all about. It's shining a light on our beautiful businesses in a positive way. Thank you for... You know, and I feel ⁓ it's a way to get more connected to the city. It's a way to have appreciation and...

Gerry (2:03:48)

Yes, ⁓

And thank you for doing that. Thank you so much for doing it. course.

Host (2:04:05)

Garner so much more respect that now every time I go, I didn't know your story. I didn't know anything about you. I never met you before. So now when I go to my coffee shop and get a little flavor and I, and I see that I now have this, I'm going to have this forever. This flood of like respect and understanding of everything that's gone in to that bottle being on that shelf for it to be an option for me. know, and I think that, uh, yeah, I just can't.

Gerry (2:04:29)

I appreciate that.

I know Dave does too and our staff do as well because we really do care and we don't care from, we don't care that it's us. We don't care that, you know, I don't want a fancy sports car. I don't want a massive mansion, right? don't, those are the things that I seek. I want time.

To spend with my kids. I want time to spend with my partner my family that's what I want to buy back because i've lost a lot of time and so is dave We've lost a lot of our time and our health and our mental health this this whole journey has pushed us to our limits and now that we've experienced or in the middle of experiencing about 10 years of forecasted growth in three months is nuts And even this has been an absolute challenge. this hat

is actually cool. But this hat I had to get because I had I had stress induced alopecia. What's the whole back of my head? All my hair fell out.

Host (2:05:28)

when your hair falls out? Yeah. ⁓

Gerry (2:05:30)

I didn't know what happened. And all I was riddled with stress. used to read blotching all over my face. Whoa, like crazy outbreaks up and down my inside of my arms on my arms. Like that's that's serious stress. Like that's yeah, it's like go to the hospital now and do the cardiology test and wear this around for a week.

So we can monary like we've been through that. Like this is the type of stuff that you go through as an entrepreneur, right? Yeah. But we're not on social going to look at me. I'm going through so much. This is our struggle. We're just trying to put on for our city, our community, our staff and our country and do something really unique and fun and be creative and bring in affordable indulgence into somebody's life that they get to have a little something sweet. Yeah. A little treat, you know.

Host (2:06:19)

it's a beautiful thing that that it's become how am I trying to say? Like so many small businesses don't make it. What's the percentage of small businesses that don't make it? It's absolutely ridiculous. So when you have one that is successful, ⁓ you know, let's bring us up and like actually this is what we all want for all these small businesses is for them to

Gerry (2:06:41)

Here's a big slice of reality. Last month was the first month in 11 years where we've been profitable.

Host (2:06:48)

⁓ That's gonna blow people's minds.

Gerry (2:06:51)

Almost took a spatula like a like a industrial spatula to pull my head off my account our accountants desk when she told me that because I was I was glued to it with my own tears and I Was blubbering mess when she told me that I collapsed basically on on her desk for about 10 15 minutes. I couldn't stop Like I'm little little of a clempt right now. Just saying like 11 years to finally turn around and be like

Host (2:07:16)

It's still so fresh right now, Right? Yeah, you're still in it. ⁓

Gerry (2:07:19)

I'm

still from the philosophy of this isn't landing with me. I cannot pat myself on the back because I'll be the guy throwing up my arms right before the thing before the finish line and you see somebody else cross it or he falls down or it's like, know,

Host (2:07:33)

have your experience

of all those TV shows that didn't make it. You're so close and so close and you're waiting for it to

Gerry (2:07:39)

That champagne still in the bottom of the fridge. Yeah, you know, I haven't been able to pop the cork on it yet nor will I because I don't feel like it's it's it's there yet that it's tangible that it's real. Yeah, right. But all I know is that, you know, my mom said, how do my mom in reaction, it said, ⁓ my gosh, so what do do now? And I said, Well, mom, the only thing I know is, is that it's happening. And my job is to go in now every day and make sure that it keeps happening.

Yeah. I don't just have myself and Dave anymore. I've or my kids are my own, our own families. You know, Dave's having a, his second child tomorrow. Tomorrow we get a new baby coming into the world and in our company and like we do it for our kids, know, my, my youngest works for us, as I think I mentioned. And I said to him the other day, I'm like, this is like, you gotta be the standard bearer because I didn't, I'm not, I won't get to enjoy any of this. I I'm to be like,

Host (2:08:16)

What?

Gerry (2:08:35)

70 and still like up in my office here. Like I'm not going to be on like jet skiing and like driving sports cars. I'm like, that's that's on you. I'm not doing this anymore for me. This what I'm leaving to you. So yeah, in the now you have to bear the that this is your company because eventually one day you'll it will be passed down passed down to you. It'll be whether that's monetarily or literally the keys to the

to the company, like start driving this thing, you know? Yeah. You know, and same thing with Dave's kids, right?

Host (2:09:06)

amazing thing you know when you talk about that father role too if it's something that they want that they're able to that you're able to pass this labor of love and your whole life coming into building something and then pass it on to your child

Gerry (2:09:20)

Well, I think that that's at the end of the day, as we replicate in any species, it's just, you know, you want to become stronger in that chain. You want to become, you want to take a footstep.

A bit further than your ancestors, right? While carrying their legacy through and fixing that ancestral history from ancestral curses and pitfalls. And you want to course correct what's come from before and as much as you possibly can so that you can move that lineage forward a little bit. Right. I had a nice little 1981 Corvette that was like, you know, $12,000 for me to buy at a pool.

I'd be a happy dude little tiny house. I'm happy. I'm not doing this really for me to be rich and have all my Like I'm rich and experienced Cool, I can hit my boss tomorrow. Not gonna what I don't but if I do I'm good. Yeah, I got to taste chocolate. Yeah

Host (2:10:05)

⁓ but you are rich. Yeah, like your life.

Most of these big houses and fancy cars are not cell-phoned anyways.

Gerry (2:10:22)

I

got to see Star Wars when I was a kid in the theater, right? got all the stuff that I got to do as a person born. I got to hear Nirvana for the first time. got to see some. I know my brother did, though. Yeah, I saw him at the town pump. I didn't get to see him live. But but there are groups and experiences that I've had that I've been like, I got to see them live. I got to go and hang out with.

Host (2:10:32)

Wait, you saw Nirvana live?

I think you grew up I think you grew up in like the coolest era ever to grow up in I'm 10 years after you yeah you so the like I think the 80s is so cool but I was too young to remember the 80s I'm more of a 90s kid yeah but to experience all the tech come into the life like that one I don't think that'll ever be replicated to that degree

Gerry (2:11:02)

It was so awesome.

No.

No, it was such a, it was such a cool time. And the whole rise of IP of intellectual property where it became integrated into consumerism, but in such a playful, cool, creative way where it was like, Hey, we want to launch these action figures. Okay. What are they based on? Well, we want to do this thing called secret wars. And it's with all the Marvel characters coming together on this big battle play set called battle world. And we'll sell all of the individual characters.

And we're gonna make this we're gonna bring it all together in this one big toy idea cool Can you guys write a comic book a 12? Issue comic book series called secret wars to sell the toys Yep, so then the toy company Mattel does the toys Marvel does the comics and now it's there's two secret wars movies coming out two years from now Directed by the Russo brothers and Marvel so it's all

And now we get to mine. We call it, they call it nostalgia mining. get to mine our childhood for all the things that we're spoiled. We're so spoiled. It's like, I love the Care Bears. Do you want shirts? Do you want toys? Do you want water bottles? You want coffee mugs? You want the movie? You want the, right? It's like.

Host (2:12:09)

So in that

What

actually want is that day and age where you can have everything you want right at the tip, know, which yeah.

Gerry (2:12:28)

But we've kind of moved in the other direction. Yeah. But there's what a time to be a creator. Yeah. Right. Yeah. A lot of time to be a creator. It's wild. Yeah.

Host (2:12:39)

Anyways, I feel like, should we wrap her up? Sure. I can't thank you enough. This was a great morning.

Gerry (2:12:44)

No, thank you. ⁓

Well, hopefully you got some good stuff and got some insight and

Host (2:12:50)

blown away by it. You know, when people come, don't really know. I purposely don't research anything because it ruins kind of the spontaneity and the allure of the reveal of the I'm just absolutely blown away right now. Really? Wow. Yeah.

Gerry (2:13:03)

Yeah, yeah.

Host (2:13:09)

Yeah, two hours ago I knew nothing and now I'm whoa, look at the life these guys live.

Gerry (2:13:14)

Well, I mean I'm I'm part of a of a bigger bigger equation and a bigger story with our company so I'm just part of it and ⁓ I'm just so super blessed to be to have ⁓ a friend like Dave and a company and the staff that we have and a Community that we have and to have all of that like I did. It's not lost on me. Like I said, I'm good. I'm good I got to taste chocolate. I got to see

Host (2:13:39)

He

got to run your ear.

Gerry (2:13:40)

I got to ride in an airplane. I got to be in a boat. I got to swim in cool places. I'm good. The rest of it is just all this, right?

Host (2:13:50)

I was

going to say the rest is icing on the cake, but really you should say like the rest is like syrup. The rice is your syrup flavor. Yeah. Well, let's wrap her up. Thank you.

Gerry (2:13:54)

sugar in the syrup right the syrup in the latte yeah the choices yeah thank

you so much for having me and salute to you for doing this yeah