Every summer, while other kids headed to Cultus Lake or camping trips, Gurleen Maan was spending her days behind a tiny roadside berry stand.
“I was probably six or seven,” the third-generation entrepreneur recalls. “I would spend my summers helping the family business, because that’s what you have to do as an immigrant’s daughter. You have to help the family succeed.”
Gurleen is referring to Maan Farms, the 100-plus-acre Abbotsford farm she now helps run alongside her parents, Amir and Gaurav. The family’s story began in the late 1970s, when Gurleen’s grandparents immigrated to British Columbia from India as part of a generation of Punjabi Sikh families seeking new opportunities. But despite their current profession, they weren’t farmers back home. “Farming in Canada was just an opportunity that my grandparents saw as a way to survive,” Gurleen says.
With a modest roadside stand and long days picking berries, the family slowly built a livelihood. Gurleen’s father worked three jobs while her mother raised four children, with everyone pitching in whenever they could. By 2005, however, her parents saw an opportunity to rethink the business entirely. Instead of simply growing and selling produce, they began inviting people onto the farm itself.
A small petting zoo marked the beginning of a transformation that would eventually turn the Abbotsford landmark into one of B.C.’s best-known agritourism destinations. Today, Maan Farms draws visitors year-round with its spring tulip festival, fall pumpkin patch, famed haunted corn maze (advertised as the scariest in the country), berry winery, strawberry U-pick fields and steady stream of new experiences—goat yoga, cow pilates, paintball and even a racing track with modified kid bikes. The berries themselves are processed into everything from wine and jam to pies and ice cream, extending the value of each harvest well beyond the growing season. Even the café tells the family’s story, pairing towering, Instagram-worthy berry soft serves with house-made samosas and chickpea curry—a nod to the Punjabi heritage behind the space.
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Despite the constant drive to innovate, reinvention hasn’t always come easily at Maan Farms. Like many multigenerational family business owners, the Maans balance the cautious instincts of the older generation with the ambitions of the next. Gurleen and her siblings often push for new technologies, marketing strategies and visitor experiences, while their parents—whose understanding of entrepreneurship was rooted in survival—tend to favour a more conservative approach.
Even so, the Maans’ willingness to challenge each other—and dream bigger—has carried the family a long way from that original 10-by-10-foot berry stand. Today, the farm’s estate wines are stocked in more than 800 liquor stores across Canada, including some LCBO outlets in Ontario. The family recently purchased another property just down the road, where they’re already quietly imagining the next chapter.
