CareersNOW! Future of Food Scholarship recipient William Loewith wasn’t introduced to the business side of food through books. He grew up in it. In many ways, his own backyard was his classroom.
A fourth-generation dairy farmer from Lynden, Ontario, Loewith grew up learning the daily complexities of running Joseph Loewith & Sons, his family’s dairy farm. It wasn’t long before he began taking on responsibilities of his own. By 13, he was contributing directly to the daily operations—helping to feed the calves and eventually milk cows during the afternoons and evenings.
“Growing up, at first, I kind of didn’t realize it was all that special because the farm was all I ever knew,” Loewith says.
Of course, he juggled his responsibilities on the farm with his regular schooling like any other student. But the experience was giving him a perspective few of his peers could claim. When friends heard about his milking shifts, the reaction was usually a mix of confusion and amusement. “They think it’s the silliest thing ever,” he says with a laugh.
When COVID hit, his parents began exploring ways to expand the farm. Their answer was to start bottling their own milk and build a store on the property. The timing was significant. “It seemed that the opening of the store was going to happen around the time I was graduating. So, I ended up deferring my offer to university, taking a gap year to help them start the business from scratch.”
The gap year marked Loewith’s first real foray into food and beverage processing. With a brand-new production facility to set up, the early work was unglamorous but essential. “At the start, it was mostly cleaning,” he says. “I was scrubbing bottles, scrubbing food processing equipment.”
In the meantime, his parents were figuring out the product side of things. To learn the science behind making chocolate milk and cheese curds, the family consulted with the University of Guelph, who walked them through the processes and equipment they would need. “They had no idea where to start,” Loewith says.
But as the operation got up and running, so did his responsibilities — and so did the team behind it. Laura McKay, the farm’s food processing manager, handled much of the chemistry: heating the milk, adding the culture, separating and draining the curds. Soon the facility was bottling milk two to three times a week and expanding their offerings to chocolate milk, white milk, cream, coffee milk, and cheese curds. Loewith was right in the thick of it, flipping large blocks of cheese curds, feeding them through the cutting machine, mixing them with salt, and packaging them into 100-gram containers.
That hands-on education extended beyond the production floor. During subsequent summers, Loewith took the family’s products directly to consumers, running the booth at four farmers’ markets a week, in Hamilton, Ancaster, Dundas, and Aldershot. It was there that he discovered what drives him most about the food industry. “Delivering that high-quality product to people makes me happy,” he says. “It was always surprisingly fun to watch their eyes light up and be like, ‘This is better than I was expecting.'”
Today, Summit Station Dairy, located on the same property as Joseph Loewith & Sons, is open Wednesday through Sunday, and customers can even peer into the processing room from the store floor. For Loewith, it’s a tangible reminder of what his family built from the ground up.
Now studying at Trent University in Peterborough, where he is pursuing a Bachelor of Business Administration with a specialization in marketing and consumer culture, Loewith is bringing that same practical mindset to the classroom. He sees his degree as both an asset to the family business and a foundation for wherever his career takes him.
“The business degree was broad enough yet applied in what you learn, that no matter what I wanted to do after university, the degree would help me,” he says. His marketing and advertising coursework has already sparked ideas about how to tell the farm’s story — whether by leaning into its local roots, its quality, or its role in supporting dairy farming.
As for the longer term, Loewith is candid that he’s still learning the full picture of the business, but he finds himself drawn to the idea of growing the wholesale side, getting the farm’s butter and cream onto restaurant menus across Hamilton and Toronto. “I won’t presume to know what I’m talking about just yet,” he says. “I’m hoping to learn for a while.”
