Yes, and yes.
First of all, Conestoga is, rest assured through the chair, a partner of ours. They're a member of the Southern Ontario Network for Advanced Manufacturing Innovations, so they receive funding through us from FedDev and they are doing great things.
Every project we do is in concert with a company. There isn't one that we do just for the curiosity of the staff or faculty; in everything we do, there's a company involved. That's because, eventually, we want that company to take the results of the research and commercialize them.
In the case of our products, our wine, our beer and our distillates, those are made by students in their courses, and it's our own brand. That's part of the academic side of the house; it's not so much the research side. We do research in beverages, and I mentioned the distillate example with the “zero gin”. We do a whole bunch of other research on beer and wine, but these products that we sell are part of our academic delivery. Having stores on campus is partly to give students the real-world experience of having to take their product from the vine all the way to the cash register. It's also a way of making sure that we improve our brand in the region and we recoup a bit of the cost of these fairly expensive programs.
