How it all began:
Left Coast Naturals was founded as “Skeet & Ike’s” in 1996 by two friends, Ian Walker and Jason Dorland. The company actually began as a graphic design project as Jason was a student at the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver. For his year-end project he decided to design a packaging concept for a food product he had been making at home. Jason had developed some unique peanut butters and decided that he would call them “Skeet & Ike’s Nut Just Nuts Spreads” - after himself (Skeet was his nickname) and his dog Ike. After graduation, the two friends decided to turn Jason’s school project into a business and, therefore, began making the peanut butters at some borrowed commercial kitchen space at night during the week and selling them at Granville Island Market on the weekend.
Eventually, stores starting asking for their products. However, when Jason and Ian approached distributors the answer was, “No”. So, they took the matter into their own hands and distributed their own products themselves. By 1998, Skeet & Ike’s got into making Organic Snacks and got out of manufacturing peanut butter. Even though they were still delivering everything themselves (they had graduated from the trunk of their cars to a delivery van by this time) they decided that they needed to distribute other products to expand the distribution. They saw an opportunity for a small distributor carrying a small number of items to do well and compete against the larger distributors. They also had one advantage in that Skeet & Ike’s acted as a “rack jobber” going to stores and writing orders and stocking shelves for the retailers. No one else did that in the natural foods industry back then – and no one else does it even today! Skeet & Ike’s distribution was born and added 5 new brands in the first year focusing on only unique brands that “sold themselves”. Eventually Skeet & Ike’s expanded into a larger warehouse space with larger trucks and by 2009 had a 26,000 sq ft warehouse and a fleet of trucks delivering 25 different brands as well as 150 skus of Organic Bulk Commodities.
Since Skeet & Ike’s was the name of the product we manufactured as well as the name of the distribution business, in 2009 we decided to celebrate the success of Skeet & Ike’s distribution by giving the company it’s own name. So the Skeet & Ike’s distribution side of the business became Left Coast Naturals. See NAME to read more about this change and our corporate philosophy for the business.
Left Coast Naturals and Skeet & Ike’s have been selected as one of the Fastest Growing Businesses in BC (by Business in Vancouver Magazine) for several years and have also been selected for PROFIT Magazines 100 fastest growing companies in Canada. And, most recently, Ian was chosen as one the Top Forty Under 40 Entrepreneurs by Business in Vancouver!
