The Real Story Behind Salt Spring Coffee

I came to Salt Spring Island in 1981 to visit my brother, Ross. I never left, at least not by choice.

What started as a visit turned into a life. Ross was farming out at Mansell Farm, and something about the island grabbed hold of me. The pace, the community, the sense that you could build something real here. Salt Spring Island in those days had a population of around 5,000. It wasn't the tourist destination it's become, it was a working island, full of long-time families, farmers, artists, and people who'd come looking for an alternative way of living.

Robbyn and I rekindled our lives around that time (a whole other story), and together we started an organic market garden at Mansell Farm. This was before "organic" was a marketing term. It was just how we grew food; carefully, attentively, with respect for the land. In 1985, our daughter Metta was born at the farm. That same year I started my sawmill business

The mill became my contribution to the island's fabric. Over the years, we supplied lumber for some of the island’s most recognizable structures, ArtSpring, Grace Point Square, Moby's Pub, the Ganges Village Market, Creekside and custom homes. When walking through Ganges, attending a show at ArtSpring, grocery shopping or enjoying a beer and dinner at Moby’s, there's a good chance you've been surrounded by wood that came through my mill. I ran that operation from 1985 right through to 1996.

Meanwhile, Robbyn was weaving her own threads into the community through dance, sharing movement and creativity with the island’s multi-generational community. We were rooted. We were Salt Spring. Together we’ve created a home for ourselves, our daughter and now three grandchildren.

In April 1996, we opened a shop-roaster café in Ganges and named it Salt Spring Roasting Co (later known as Salt Spring Coffee). We were roasting right there in the middle town in the café, the aroma of fresh-roasted coffee drifting out onto the street. It felt right. It felt like Salt Spring. But within a year, the roaster outgrew the space, and we had to move it out. What followed was a string of location-moves around the island as we tried to find a permanent home for our growing business.

We weren't just growing and roasting beans, we realized we were trail blazing. Salt Spring Coffee became one of the first certified organic, fair-trade coffee companies in Canada. We were travelling to and building relationships with farmers halfway around the world, sourcing with intention, roasting with care. The business had a soul, and that soul was Salt Spring Island.

But Salt Spring Island, or more precisely its governance, had other ideas.

After exhausting our options for suitable space on the island, we began working with the Islands Trust to find a more permanent solution. The Islands Trust, for those unfamiliar, is the governing body responsible for land use on the Gulf Islands, a body with a mandate to "preserve and protect" the islands. In principle, admirable. In practice, what we experienced was something else.

After several failed attempts to find a home for our coffee roasting facility, the trustees at the time gave us what felt like a real signal of support: “find some land”, they said, “and we'll rezone it for you”. So we did. We bought land. We invested time, money, and a significant amount of hope into an 18-month process to make it work.

Then the Islands Trust said “NO”.

In those 18 months, there had been a trustee election. A new trustee came in and reversed everything we'd built toward. The support we'd had evaporated. The answer was NO. A slow NO that came after we’d already committed, already planned, already begun building a future around the assumption that Salt Spring Island wanted us to stay.

We would have appreciated being told NO earlier in the process.

The cost wasn't just financial. Salt Spring Coffee was growing fast, and the disruption of having to completely rejig our plans mid-stride was enormous. We spent nine months searching for a new home in the Vancouver area. We ended up in Richmond. In October 2010, the roasting part and offices of the company left Salt Spring Island.

We've thought about that departure a lot in the years since. We always knew, at some point, the business would need to grow beyond what the island could physically accommodate. But that was supposed to be a thoughtful transition, not an eviction. What surprised us the most, was how one person could completely reverse the direction of our local business and in doing so, disrupt the livelihoods of everyone connected to our business.

It goes to show how fragile things can be when governance lacks vision.

Robbyn and I still love Salt Spring Island. We don't know where else we would want to live. The community is extraordinary, creative, caring, resilient. The island has so much potential. But that potential keeps getting stuck, held back by a system that too often says NO when it should be asking HOW.

2026 marks the 30th year of Salt Spring Coffee. Most people who drink our coffee don't know this backstory. They don't know about the mill, the market garden, the land we bought, the trustees who reversed course, that October morning when we packed up the roaster and moved it off the island that had been its home for nearly 15 years.

What we're most proud of is this: we didn't let the dysfunction of the Islands Trust define us. Salt Spring Coffee kept growing, kept caring, kept standing for something good. “Salt Spring” is in our name. It always will be.

That's not bitterness. That's belonging.

Mickey McLeod