 There’s a mural in the front office at Cole Munro Foods that stops you in your tracks. Commissioned as a gift from a long-time supplier, it tells the full life cycle of a trout in rich, sweeping detail from a fingerling hatching in a cold-water stream all the way to harvest. Look closely enough, and you’ll spot easter eggs worked in by the artist: one of the company’s boats, a basketball player, a yin and yang symbol tucked in for the twins, Andrew and Harrison. A company that has built a close enough connection with a supplier that they would commission something that personal, that specific, is telling you something about itself before you’ve even asked a question.
Geoff Cole and Todd Munro founded the company in 1994, operating out of Port Stanley, just two men and a red truck. Geoff grew up near Lake Huron, gained commercial fish experience as a summer job, and later worked with a trout co-op in Guelph. When that operation wound down, a friend nudged him toward starting something of his own. He wasn’t sold on the idea at first. But he and his wife, Susan, looked at a map, identified an area with the right existing zoning, and started calling around. They settled on Port Stanley. Susan, who was still working in Mississauga at the time, agreed to give it a year. That was 30 years ago. The year that never ended“He [Geoff] said, ' Come for a year,” Susan recalls with a laugh. “We’re going to stay here for a year and then move on.” Instead, they had their children here. Made their closest friends here. And gradually, almost without realizing it, built one of the most significant food businesses in southwestern Ontario. Today, Cole Munro supplies roughly 80% of Canada’s fresh trout, a statistic that still feels slightly surreal when you’re standing in their bright, purpose-built facility on Edward Street in St. Thomas, talking to Susan and her son Harrison about ice rooms and feed conversion ratios and what it takes to grow a fish in Ontario. The company didn’t grow in a straight line. It grew the way many great things do, through stubbornness and curiosity and a few decisions that looked small at the time. When the farms that supplied their fish began to age out, longtime operators retiring without successors, Cole Munro started buying them rather than lose their supply. They now own farms on Manitoulin Island and Georgian Bay, with roughly 150 employees across the entire operation, and process somewhere between 12 and 13 million pounds of fish a year.
Harrison, who leads packaging and new product development, lets that number land for a moment before adding context: By volume, Cole Munro processes enough sustainably farmed Ontario Trout to hit early 50% of the entire sustainable fish yield of Lake Erie, and they still have room to grow. Why St. Thomas?When it came time to build a permanent processing home, something they could grow into, something they designed themselves, they had options. Brantford. Woodstock. London. Chatham. All reasonable choices on paper. They chose St. Thomas, and the deciding factor wasn’t a tax incentive or a site servicing deal. It was their people. “We have several employees who’ve been with us for over 20 years,” Susan explains. “When we started looking at where to build, we didn’t want to lose them. That was a big part of it.” The location made practical sense, too. Two hours from Toronto, two hours from Detroit, with strong access to a skilled labour pool and the City’s reliable municipal water infrastructure, an underappreciated advantage for a business that processes at serious volume and requires rigorous water quality testing on site. But it was the community piece that sealed it. They lucked out on a ten-acre property at 175 Edward Street, and they didn’t take that for granted. The building that went up on that site reflects a company that has thought carefully about what it means to build something that lasts.  A building that was designed to think ahead. The option to build with purpose can be a valuable opportunity compared to a retrofit, and the U-Shape line at Cole Munro is a perfect example. Incoming product arrives at the receiving bay on one side: finished product loads out from the other. There’s a logic to the flow, almost like a chain of custody, but for food. Every step from receiving to processing to packaging moves in one direction, clean and intentional. Food safety thinking is built into the architecture. Walk through, and you notice the same intentionality applied to benefit the people who work there. The lunchroom has big windows. This sounds like a small thing, but it isn’t. Employee spaces are often tucked into windowless corners as an afterthought rather than an intentional consideration. Here, the natural light feels deliberate. A family doing what they can to make everyone feel at home. The processing floor itself is a mix of advanced automation and skilled human hands, and the balance between the two is interesting. Automated scales handle precision weighing for packaging. Bone vacuuming equipment does what it sounds like: it pulls fine pin bones from fillets with impressive efficiency. But despite the automation, there are an impressive number of skilled hands operating equipment, checking quality, and precision cutting. These are experienced people. And sometimes, Susan notes with a bit of pride, the equipment struggles to keep up with them. “Some of our staff have been here a long time. They’re incredibly skilled at what they do.”
One of my favourite elements about the opportunity to get a look inside the manufacturing and processing operations in St. Thomas is learning about the very practical elements of a business that are so obvious you don’t even think about it, so seeing it surprises you. The ice room is one of those details that catches you off guard. Of course, ice is central to the whole operation, fresh fish, tightly temperature-controlled from the moment it arrives at the receiving bay. In a business built on freshness, ice isn’t just a practical necessity; it’s part of the product’s story. And it’s part of Harrison and Andrew’s employment story, as shovelling that ice was one of their first company jobs. But back to the operation's intentionality. Even waste is salvaged using a network of pipes above the processing floor, ensuring that fish waste from the operation isn’t wasted. The pipes carry it to another refrigerated space, where it is emptied into large cooler bins for transportation. It’s diverted to pet food companies, a small but telling detail about how Cole Munro approaches its footprint. Nothing goes out the door that can be put to use. Water processing is also a major consideration. Water quality is a priority on the farm as much as it is at Cole Munro's processing facility. Water quality and access were among the factors that weighed in favour of expanding the facilities in St. Thomas. The City of St. Thomas consistently ranks in the top tier of municipal water systems in Ontario water regulations. It’s a crucial consideration in food processing. Cole Munro continues with that consideration and treats wastewater to ensure effluent entering the municipal system is already treated, meeting requirements similar to those of the municipal outflows. This type of conservation and intentionality supports not only their values as a company, but our entire municipal structure.  Aquaculture is farmingOne thing Susan and Harrison come back to more than once is how aquaculture is perceived. Most people, they say, think of fish processing as a fisheries business: boats, lakes, quotas. But what Cole Munro does is closer to agriculture. Farming, in the truest sense. “If you don’t have clean water, you don’t have good fish,” Susan says. “Just like a crop farmer cares about their soil.” Every fish the company processes is traced from the moment the egg hatches. What it ate, where it was raised, and how it was cared for. The company has implemented international certifications and maintains consistent best practices across all farms, regardless of which level of government each farm reports to; some operate under provincial Ministry of Natural Resources licenses, while others operate under Band Council resolutions with Indigenous partners.
Those Indigenous partnerships, Susan mentions, are woven through the whole farming operation. Every fish Cole Munro processes is raised in cooperation with First Nations communities, either on First Nation land, through a band-licensed operation, or in direct partnership with an Indigenous-owned farm. It’s a piece of the story that maybe gets less attention in southwestern Ontario than it would further north, but it matters. Fishing is part of First Nations culture and identity. It sustains First Nations peoples and economies and is a constitutionally protected inherent and Treaty right. It’s clear that those partnerships matter to Cole Munro in their stewardship of the water systems they care for and the partnerships they’ve built. As with any farm, climate change presents unique challenges. For Cole Munro, the biggest environmental challenge looking ahead is warming water temperatures. Trout thrive between 12 and 18 degrees Celsius. Above that, feed conversion declines, stress risk rises, and growth slows. Ontario’s winters are home to frozen lakes, a long, cold season that delays their grow-out timeline to about 18 months compared to 8 months in a warmer climate like Chile. But that freeze is a feature, not a bug. The cold resets the water. Kills parasites. Keeps the fish healthy. On the nutrition side, trout holds up remarkably well compared to other proteins. The feed conversion ratio, “how many pounds of feed are needed to produce a pound of fish,” is about 1.2:1, far more efficient than pork or beef. It’s high in omega-3s and protein values highly comparable to beef, but is generally easier to digest. And if you’re buying Cole Munro products at your local grocery store or Costco, they were predominantly raised in northern Ontario and processed in southwestern Ontario. Not Scotland. Not South America. Here.  Home, unexpectedlySusan grew up as a bit of a wanderer. Lived in a lot of places. Never really expected to stay anywhere. And then St. Thomas became home, and it happened almost before she noticed. Her parents eventually moved closer. Two nephews relocated. People who started as strangers became some of the best friends she and Geoff have ever had. “This is the Hub,” she says, laughing. “Everyone comes here for Christmas now.” What they appreciate about St. Thomas, in practical terms, is the balance. Big enough to have real infrastructure, a good hospital, access to labour, proximity to London, and an expressway that gets you almost anywhere in southern Ontario in two hours. Small enough that community investment still lands. Still means something. Susan and Geoff didn’t just raise their family in St. Thomas; they raised a business. From two men and a truck to what is now their third local location (second in St. Thomas), the pair recognizes that there is still room to grow because of the community they chose to call home. Their workforce and family are here, with both their sons, Harrison and Andrew, graduating from shovelling ice to making a space for themselves in the family business's growth. It’s evident that Cole Munro is still very much a family business, ready to help you put food on the table for yours. Cole Munro Foods is located at 175 Edward Street in St. Thomas. Their fresh Ontario steelhead trout is available at major grocers across Ontario and Quebec. Learn more at colemunro.com.
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