Chambly’s hidden gem
FERME GUYON COMBINES A FARMER’S MARKET, GARDEN CENTRE, GREENHOUSE AND FARM TO OFFER VISITORS A CULINARY EXPERIENCE AND CONTACT WITH NATURE
André Dion, 70, says he’s infected with something incurable: entrepreneur’s disease. “And it’s contagious,” he said, pointing to son Sébastien, 39, a partner in his ambitious new venture, Ferme Guyon, a combination garden centre and nursery, farmer’s market, working farm and teaching centre along the Eastern Townships Autoroute about 30 kilometres east of Montreal in Chambly.
It’s a sprawling, $9-million complex occupying 10 acres that includes an imposing red barn-like structure housing gardening acces- sories and a variety of fresh and processed foods (mostly grown or made in Quebec), a butterfly room where upward of 40 varieties flutter about, a barn with farm animals, quail and even a couple of emu, a greenhouse where plants, shrubs, vegetables and herbs are grown for on-site resale, a meticulously restored 150-year-old wood barn, and even a working beehive.
Next month, they’ll add a restaurant. Next year will bring an aboriginal village where the crafts of Quebec’s First Nations will be showcased and explained.
“For me, this is a dream,” said Dion, a former chief executive of the Rona hardware chain and later, co-founder of the boutique Quebec brewer Unibroue, sold to Sleeman’s in 2004.
Dion said he never seriously considered retirement after selling the brewery, and set his mind to realizing Ferme Guyon, a concept for which he’d already laid the groundwork by accumulating agricultural land along Highway 10 during the 1990s. He’s got a large personal stake in the project, since less than half the total investment is financed.
“I’m from Lac St. Jean, and all my relatives were farmers,” Dion said. “I thought I’d go back one day but never did. I chose instead to do my project in Chambly.”
Still, it was a three-year fight to get permission to operate a commercial establishment on agricultural land, a battle that initially pitted him against Quebec’s powerful agricultural lobby, the Union des Producteurs Agricoles (UPA), although that body has since come around “because they can see we’re supporting Quebec producers,” Dion said.
Even now, Ferme Guyon is easy to overlook because of restrictions on signage in an agricultural zone. It’s been open almost two years, yet many Quebecers who routinely travel up and down Highway 10 have no idea it’s there at the intersection with Highway 35.
Before the opening, Dion and his son, an accountant, travelled the world looking at different ways that retailers combined food, gardening, nature and history.
They merged those ideas in Ferme Guyon.
“To succeed today, you have to do things differently,” Dion said.
“It’s very different from beer, which people consume less of as they get older. Gardening is something they do more of, so demographically, that’s favourable for us. And your customers are predominantly women, which also is the opposite of the beer business.”
Ferme Guyon was named after Jean Guyon, an ancestor who immigrated to Quebec from France in 1635. (The name Guyon evolved into Dion over time).
One of the Dions’ early boosters and closest advisers on the project, celebrity chef Ricardo Larrivée (known professionally by his first name), has since become a partner. He owns 20 per cent of the business.
What he liked about Ferme Guyon were the values it promoted: healthy eating, local production, family outings, education, an appreciation of nature and history.
“I was impressed by their vision, and immediately drawn to the idea of joining forces with a company that offers visitors both a culinary experience and contact with the nature that contributed to creating it,” said Ricardo, a neighbour of André Dion in Chambly.
He describes Ferme Guyon as “a cathedral of food and knowledge transmission, where priority always will go to Quebec producers and where suggestions from the public are welcome.”
Unlike large grocery chains, Ferme Guyon does not charge producers for shelf space.
“If your product is here, it’s because it’s good,” Sébastien Dion said.
The operation, which has 35 full-time employees, generated revenue of about $1.8 million during its 10-month season last year (it‘s closed in January and February). The total should double in 2012, André Dion said.
Because garden centres tend to do the bulk of their sales in a three-month period from April to June, the challenge is to keep customers coming the rest of the year, which is one of the reasons for the other attractions.
These include workshops for children aged 5 to 12 to demonstrate how products such as bread, butter, honey and wool are made, “stuff they no longer learn at school,” Sébastien Dion said.
“We want to be a destination, a place where people can spend a couple of hours,” he added.
André Dion, whose other son, Jean-françois, also is a partner, said he has already been approached about setting up similar facilities elsewhere in the province, and it could happen in time. “I told them, let us do it for a few years first, to refine things.”