From Night Shifts to a National Brand: How Margaret Coons Built Nuts For Cheese

Margaret Coons started making plant-based cheese after hours in a rented restaurant kitchen in London, Ontario. A decade later, Nuts For Cheese is a national food manufacturing business selling across Canada and the United States.

There were nights when Margaret Coons would finish working the dinner shift at a vegan restaurant in London, Ontario, only for another shift to begin.

She would get out her bag of cashews, a vacuum sealer and a scale and use the restaurant’s commercial kitchen after hours. She was able to rent the space by the hour, keeping her costs low while she made the first batches of what would become Nuts For Cheese.

The following day, she would take the products to a farmers’ market and sell them.

Then she would head back to the restaurant and cook the dinner shift again.

It is a long way from the company Nuts For Cheese is today. Its products are sold by major retailers across Canada and the United States, while its London facility operates as a very different kind of food manufacturing business from the one Coons was running overnight with a few pieces of equipment.

But that modest beginning wasn't incidental to the company's growth. It was part of the strategy.

“I think the way that we started was low risk,” Coons says. “We didn't have huge overhead.”

For roughly the first year and a half, she didn't even have her own commercial space.

That gave her something valuable beyond cheap production: time to find out whether people actually wanted what she was making.

Why cashews?

Coons had been eating a plant-based diet since she was around 12 and had experimented with different nuts and seeds from an early age.

When she began developing her own product, she tried different ingredients. Cashews proved particularly useful because of their consistency and reliability.

Nuts For Cheese doesn't actually use the word “cheese” on its packaging. Coons describes it as a fermented cashew product.

The process, however, has more in common with traditional cheesemaking than someone encountering the product for the first time might expect.

“We make cashew milk. We ferment it, culture it, age it like you would a dairy cheese,” she explains.

That fermentation helps create the flavour profile the company is looking for. Nuts For Cheese uses organic ingredients and has deliberately avoided relying on the gums, fillers and artificial ingredients that can be associated with some plant-based alternatives.

For Coons, the test is straightforward: a good vegan cheese shouldn't announce itself as one the moment somebody tastes it.

But making a good product was only one part of building the company.

She also had to learn how to manufacture it.

Farmers' markets became the testing ground

In the early days, Coons sold directly to customers at farmers' markets around Southwestern Ontario.

The arrangement kept overhead low, but it also provided something that would be difficult to recreate through months of business planning: immediate feedback.

Customers could try the product. Coons could see what worked, what didn't and what people were prepared to buy.

She began approaching local restaurants and independent retailers willing to take a chance on a young company whose packaging was still far from polished.

“I didn't have beautiful professional packaging,” she says. “I didn't have everything all figured out.”

As the business moved from farmers' markets and small retailers towards larger grocery stores, the expectations changed.

Food safety requirements became more demanding. Production had to become more consistent. There were promotional costs, trade support and an entirely new retail system to understand.

Farm Boy became the company's first major customer and provided Coons with another education in what scaling actually meant.

For the first time, there were formal purchase orders and listing forms. Products needed to be stacked on pallets, wrapped and loaded onto trucks.

Things that are routine for an established manufacturer were entirely new.

“We'd never done anything like that before,” Coons says.

Four stores became 90 — then national

Another significant step came through Sobeys' local program, which gave Nuts For Cheese an opportunity to prove itself gradually.

The company started in four Sobeys stores near London.

Four became nine.

Nine became 49.

Then 90.

Eventually, Nuts For Cheese became a national Sobeys vendor.

That gradual expansion mattered. Instead of suddenly being expected to supply an enormous national retail network, the company was able to learn how to operate as a supplier while increasing production alongside demand.

By this point, the business Coons had started in a restaurant kitchen was becoming a genuine manufacturing operation.

And manufacturing introduces a particular kind of pressure.

“You have ingredients, we have people that we need to support and help grow in their careers,” she says. “We have physical product.”

That physical product is also refrigerated, fermented and has a relatively short shelf life.

Unlike a software company, problems cannot simply be fixed in the next update. Ingredients have to arrive. Products have to be made. Employees have to be paid. Retailers need their orders.

Coons remembers “a lot of sleepless nights” worrying about buying cashews and making payroll in the same week.

“Bootstrapping a manufacturing company is not for the faint of heart.”

Taking Nuts For Cheese to the United States

For roughly the first five years, Nuts For Cheese concentrated on growing across Canada.

Then, in 2020, Coons decided it was time to explore the United States.

Her timing could hardly have been worse.

She flew to Anaheim, California, for the Expo West trade show. By the time her plane landed, the event had been cancelled as COVID-19 began shutting down gatherings across North America.

She was already in California, so she posted on LinkedIn asking whether anyone nearby wanted to meet or try the products.

People responded.

That improvised outreach helped connect Nuts For Cheese with its first U.S. retail partner in Los Angeles. Coons began shipping products directly from London to California using FedEx.

The American side of the business grew from there, eventually taking Nuts For Cheese into markets across the country.

It was another example of a recurring pattern in the company's story: start with something manageable, learn from it, then expand.

From founder to CEO

For seven years, Coons bootstrapped the business.

In 2022, Nuts For Cheese raised a Series A investment from Forage Capital.

The money allowed the company to grow its team, invest in equipment, improve production efficiency, launch products and spend more on marketing.

But the investment also changed Coons' own job.

A board of directors was established. The founder who had once been driving products around Southwestern Ontario was now the CEO of an institutionally backed company.

Coons describes that transition as its own learning curve.

There were also decisions to make about what should — and shouldn't — change as production increased.

“The one thing we've never sacrificed is product quality,” she says.

Efficiency was another matter.

For years, much of the work had been done by hand because the company simply didn't have the equipment that could automate or accelerate production. Even today, Coons says, a significant amount remains hands-on.

Scaling a food company wasn't about replacing the original product with something easier to manufacture. It was about finding ways to manufacture more of it without losing what made people buy it in the first place.

When international trade reaches the factory floor

Growing outside Canada has also exposed Nuts For Cheese to forces far beyond the factory.

The company now exports a significant proportion of what it manufactures, making uncertainty around tariffs and Canada–U.S. trade more than an abstract political or economic issue.

For a small manufacturer trying to fund its own growth, Coons says a large unexpected cost could be extremely difficult to absorb.

The uncertainty has already influenced decisions inside the company.

Nuts For Cheese has shifted much of its supply chain through Canada. Ingredients that might once have entered through an American port are now brought through the Port of Montreal, while the company has reviewed its suppliers to purchase within Canada wherever practical.

It's an example of how decisions made at borders can eventually change what happens on a factory floor in London, Ontario.

A new challenge for plant-based food

After a decade spent convincing retailers to stock the products and consumers to try them, Coons believes the plant-based industry now faces a different problem: perception.

Plant-based products can be grouped together with highly or ultra-processed foods, regardless of how individual products are actually made.

At the same time, consumers who tried disappointing dairy alternatives during the rapid expansion of the plant-based category may be reluctant to try another.

Nuts For Cheese is trying to position itself differently: as a whole food that can be eaten regardless of whether somebody consumes dairy, rather than simply an imitation designed for vegans.

Getting someone to taste it is often the important part.

“Just get started”

The scale of the problems has changed considerably since Coons was working in a restaurant kitchen at night.

The problems themselves haven't disappeared.

“Unfortunately, I can't turn it off,” she says. “I'm still hugely passionate about what we do.”

These days, she says, she simply gets to put out different fires.

Her experience has also left her with advice for people sitting on their own business idea: don't spend so long preparing that you never discover whether anybody actually wants it.

That doesn't mean taking enormous financial risks. In fact, the early history of Nuts For Cheese suggests almost the opposite.

Rent somebody else's kitchen. Take the product to a farmers' market. Put it in front of real customers. Listen to what they tell you.

“Get feedback, learn from the feedback and just jump into it,” Coons says.

It's difficult to imagine a cleaner description of the way Nuts For Cheese itself was built.

Before the investment, national retailers and American expansion, there was a restaurant kitchen after closing time.

A bag of cashews.

A vacuum sealer.

A scale.

And another dinner shift waiting the following day.

Nuts For Cheese is based in London, Ontario. Watch Margaret Coons tell the full story in the CanMakes film, The Night Shift That Built a National Cheese Brand.

CanMakes tells the stories of the people making, building and shaping Canada — and what it actually takes to do the work.