The three Saskatchewan farming families who turned chickpeas and lentils into a national grocery brand — and the sisters now running it

Three farms, one bottle of oil

The Three Farmers story does not start with a snack brand. It starts with a crop most Canadians have never heard of — camelina sativa, a hardy little oilseed in the same family as canola and mustard that grows well in dry prairie conditions where canola sometimes struggles. The founding Saskatchewan families — Vandenhurk, Hounjet, and Heggie — had been growing it for years as a commodity. In 2011 they decided to stop selling the raw seed and start selling a finished product: a cold-pressed Camelina Oil bottled under the Three Farmers name.

That single decision is the whole brand thesis condensed. Prairie agriculture has historically been a price-taker business — farmers grow grain and pulses, board cooperatives and commodity buyers move them through the system, and value gets captured downstream by processors, packagers, and grocery retailers. Three Farmers was built to move that value-add step back upstream, onto the farms. The oil established the model. The same farms that grew the seed controlled the brand, the bottle, and the relationship with the retailer.

The Camelina Oil bottle still sits in the lineup today, and it is the SKU that tells consumers what the brand actually is. The three farm-family logo on the front is not a marketing flourish — it is the supply chain.

From a niche oil to a national snack brand

Camelina Oil was the proof of concept, but it was never going to be the SKU that put Three Farmers in every Loblaws. The category was too small and the buyer base was too specialized. The brand needed a product that lived in a fast-moving aisle, sold by impulse, and made sense for the same prairie farms to grow. Pulses — chickpeas and lentils, two of Saskatchewan's biggest export crops — were the obvious answer.

Crunchy Little Peas, the roasted-chickpea line, launched as the answer to that question and quickly became the brand's volume SKU. The product is exactly what it sounds like: chickpeas grown by the partner farms, roasted and seasoned in a few sharp flavours — Sea Salt, Lime & Cracked Pepper, Smoky BBQ — and packed in shelf-ready snack bags. The category is large and growing: roasted pulse snacks sit at the intersection of three trends grocery buyers care about right now — plant-based protein, allergen-friendly snacking, and clean-label single-ingredient products.

Roasted Lentils followed the same playbook. The Daily Crunch line extended it into sprouted nuts and seeds. By the time the brand had three connected snack families, it was no longer a camelina oil company — it was a prairie pulse snack brand with a credible story about where the food came from. That story is what carried the brand from Saskatchewan independents to national chain placement.

Sister CEOs and the second generation

Three Farmers is now led by sisters Natasha Vandenhurk, CEO, and Elysia Vandenhurk, Chief Product Officer, daughters of one of the three founding farm families. Sister-led leadership is rare in Canadian CPG. Founding-family-second-generation leadership is also rare in Canadian agri-food at this scale. The combination is part of why the brand has been picked up by Canadian young-entrepreneur and women-in-business rankings repeatedly over the last few years.

What that leadership team has done operationally is take a regional brand into national chain distribution without losing the supply chain link back to the founding farms. The chickpeas in a bag of Crunchy Little Peas on a Loblaws shelf in Toronto are still grown on partner farms in Saskatchewan. The Camelina Oil is still pressed from seed grown on the same family ground that started the company. That continuity is the whole point of the brand — and it is also what makes the marketing material genuinely credible rather than a romantic story.

The leadership transition from the founding-farmer generation to the sister CEOs has also coincided with the brand's biggest distribution wins. Three Farmers is now stocked at Sobeys, Loblaws and Loblaw banners (Real Canadian Superstore, Loblaws supermarkets, and others), Save-On-Foods across Western Canada, Walmart Canada, Costco, and Federated Co-op stores. That is a meaningfully complete national grocery footprint for an independent brand at this stage.

What is actually in the lineup

The current Three Farmers range at threefarmers.ca sits across four connected product lines: Camelina Oil (the original prairie oilseed SKU); Crunchy Little Peas (roasted chickpeas in multiple flavours); Roasted Lentils (a similar concept executed on Saskatchewan-grown lentils); and Daily Crunch (sprouted nuts and seeds). The roasted pulse SKUs are the volume drivers in grocery. The Camelina Oil is the brand-story SKU that links every product back to the founding farms.

Crunchy Little Peas is the bag most Canadians have actually seen on shelf. It is a 100–130 gram resealable pouch with a flat, almost editorial design — a clean wordmark, a quiet flavour callout, and the Three Farmers logo. The product is certified gluten-free and allergen-friendly, which matters for school lunch and travel-snack use cases and which has driven adoption beyond traditional grocery into airlines, hospitality, and snack-box subscriptions.

Roasted Lentils extends the same logic. Lentils are the other big Saskatchewan pulse crop and the same farm network that grew the chickpeas could grow the lentils. The flavour lineup follows the same pattern — sharp, savoury, single-ingredient — and the bag sits next to Crunchy Little Peas on shelf. Daily Crunch was the brand's move into sprouted snacking, which is a smaller but growing category in Canadian grocery.

How Three Farmers stacks up in the snack aisle

The roasted-pulse snack category in Canadian retail is dominated by a few brands. Here is how the options line up in the snack aisle:

Formats and sizes reflect each brand's standard flagship SKU per publicly available product listings. Retailer availability reflects Canadian market presence as of May 2026.

What this table makes clear is that Three Farmers is the only Canadian-built roasted-pulse brand with broad national distribution across grocery, mass, and club. Saffron Road and The Good Bean are the US imports — strong category presence but limited and inconsistent Canadian listings. Hippeas is the chickpea-puff adjacent option. Made Good is a different format (granola bites) but competes for the same plant-based snack dollar in the kids and lunchbox segment. Three Farmers is the brand sitting at the intersection of Canadian provenance, clean ingredient label, and full national chain retail.

Why farm-to-shelf actually matters here

Farm-to-shelf is a phrase that gets used loosely in CPG marketing. Most brands that use it mean they buy ingredients from named suppliers and put a story on the box. Three Farmers means it more literally — the founding families are the supply, and the supply relationship was the original reason the brand exists. That changes a few things that retail buyers and consumers care about.

On the retail side it gives the brand a defensible category position that imported pulse snack brands cannot easily copy. A US brand can replicate a roasted-chickpea SKU and undercut on price, but it cannot replicate a Canadian-grown, Saskatchewan-pulse story that is also operationally true. That has translated into shelf preference at Sobeys, Loblaws, Save-On-Foods, and Federated Co-op, where Canadian provenance carries weight in pulse and snack buying.

On the consumer side it gives the brand a credible answer to the two questions shoppers actually ask about clean-label snacks: where did this come from, and is anything wrong with it. The traceability is real, the ingredient list is short, and the allergen profile is tight. That combination is the reason Crunchy Little Peas has been adopted in school lunch, travel-snack, and snack-subscription channels in addition to traditional grocery.

Where the brand lives online

Three Farmers' primary social presence is on Instagram at @threefarmersfoods. The feed leans into the prairie-farm story — fields, harvest shots, behind-the-scenes from the partner farms, and product photography that matches the editorial calm of the packaging. The brand also publishes recipes built around pulses, which is doing double duty: it educates consumers on how to use the snacks beyond the bag, and it reinforces the brand's positioning as a real food company rather than a CPG marketing exercise.

What the press has said

Three Farmers has been profiled across Canadian agri-food and grocery trade media since the national chain rollout. Here are the primary placements worth reading:

Where to actually buy it

Each link below goes directly to a Three Farmers retailer search or the brand's own catalogue — not the homepage — so you can find it without hunting:

For the full store list and product range, visit threefarmers.ca.

Frequently asked questions

Bottom line

The Three Farmers playbook is the one most Canadian primary producers wish they could run. Take a crop the prairies are already growing, do the value-add step yourself, build a brand that names the farms on the bag, and end up with a national retail footprint in Sobeys, Loblaws, Save-On-Foods, Walmart Canada, and Costco. The sister CEOs running the company have taken it from a Saskatchewan independent to a brand most Canadian grocery shoppers can find on shelf, without losing the supply chain link back to the founding farms. If you are in Canada, the brand on Instacart Canada is the fastest way to see what they have built.