Our Corn Story: How a Southern Ontario Summer Staple Shaped Sapling Kitchen + Events
Every business has an origin story. Ours happens to seem to be partially tangled up in corn and in a deep belief that buying local, especially when it comes to something as good as Southern Ontario corn, is always worth it.
Summers at the Farm
Growing up, summer meant one thing above all else: the annual party at my grandparents' farm. It was built entirely around food and community tables loaded with pot luck dishes, everyone pitching in, kids running around while the adults cooked and visited. And near the centre of it was corn on the cob, grown close to home. We'd sit together shucking husks by the bucketful, then boil the corn right over an open fire, in a kettle that was custom made for this task particularly. Nobody was driving to a grocery store for that corn, it came from the ground nearby, and you could taste the difference.
Growing Up at Herrle's Country Farm Market
My other summer education in corn and in what it means to support a local business, came from working at Herrle's as a teenager. I watched, season after season, as a business that started as a single corn stand grew into something much bigger, built entirely on the loyalty of a community that kept showing up for it. People would ask all summer long, practically counting down the days: when is the corn coming? And when it finally arrived, people got genuinely, wonderfully wild for it. Rightfully so, it's that good. My parents believed in it enough to load up dozens of cobs and drive them north to Lake Nipissing every summer, just so their friends up there could taste what Southern Ontario corn is supposed to taste like. It was a small act of local pride, exported one cooler at a time.
That's the thing about really good local corn: it doesn't stay local for long. People find ways to share it.
Cheese Corn, Corn Soup, and Falling for Sumit
When Sumit and I started dating, a lot of our early relationship happened over food, trying new places, new dishes, figuring out what we both loved. One of our go-to spots was Kim's Chicken in Waterloo, and their cheese corn became an early favourite of ours. It's funny how a shared snack can become a small landmark in a relationship's timeline and another reminder of how many of our best food memories trace back to businesses right here in Waterloo Region.
Sumit also completely rewired how I thought about corn. Up to that point, my corn world was boiled, buttered, and salted perfect, but simple. Sumit showed me it could go so much further: corn grilled and dressed with spice blends, stalks simmered down into a rich stock, crisp corn fritters, and small techniques for pulling more flavour out of an ear of corn than I knew was possible. I held my own, though I made sure he knew about Herrle's corn pizza, which remains a personal favourite I will defend to this day.
But the moment that really sealed it was corn soup. It was one of the first dishes Sumit ever made for my grandma. I'm fairly convinced that bowl of corn soup is what won her over.
Featured in CBC's Corn Column
So when Jasmine Mangalaseril from CBC Kitchener-Waterloo reached out about a column on how local growers and chefs make the most of corn season, it felt like a full-circle moment. Sumit shared some of his approach to using the whole cob, husks for steaming, stripped cobs for stock, as part of the piece. What made it special wasn't just being included; it was that this feature brought together both of our corn stories, the farm-fire version and the technique-driven version, into one conversation about a crop that's grown so well, so close to home. It's exactly the kind of local-growers-and-local-chefs story we love being part of. You can read the full column here.
Why Buying Local Still Matters to Us
Corn is a pretty simple crop to make the case for buying local. It's picked at peak sweetness, it travels a fraction of the distance, and every dollar spent on it supports a farm, a family, or a small business right here in Waterloo Region the same way Herrle's grew from one corn stand into something bigger because a community kept choosing to buy from them. That's the philosophy we try to build into Sapling Kitchen + Events: sourcing local where we can, working with growers and producers close to home, and putting that ingredient-first, community-first thinking into everything on our menus, not just the corn.
Corn Season at Sapling Kitchen
These days, our corn habit has officially outgrown our kitchen. We are currently filling our freezer with local corn for the year, to the point that we've had to buy another freezer just to keep up. All of it is destined for our menus: corn soup will be available for catering, and corn is finding its way into plenty of other dishes across our meal prep, catering, and event menus.
For us, corn was never just an ingredient. It's a farm party, a summer job, an early date, a soup that won over a grandmother, and now, a running theme through everything we cook at Sapling Kitchen + Events in Kitchener and a standing reminder of why we keep choosing local. If you'd like corn on your next catering order, soup included, reach out, we'd love to share it with you too.
Sapling Kitchen + Events is a licensed commercial kitchen and event space in Kitchener, Ontario, offering meal prep, occasion catering, corporate catering, and commercial kitchen rentals under one roof — proudly sourcing local ingredients where we can. Learn more at saplingkitchen.ca.
