Hidden Gem: Little Lake Market serving fan favourite foods with a focus on gut health

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Little Lake Market is bringing big city food options to the small township of Puslinch, Ont.

Alexander Paciorkowski opened the storefront in October 2022. It started as a food lab, but has evolved into a store that offers ready-to-go food and other health-related items.

Paciorkowski said the idea for the market came from his wife’s journey with an autoimmune illness.

“Changing the diet was a necessary part of it. That meant we had to start eating out at different places and cooking differently,” Paciorkowski said. “That eventually led me down to changing career paths to where I am today.”

Previously, Paciorkowski was managing food-related businesses.

While they were adjusting to his wife’s new dietary restrictions, he said they noticed a gap in the industry making it difficult to find tasty, satisfying food that fit their health requirements.

“I came up with the idea of what does it really mean to have a healthy diet, and do it in a way where it actually tastes very good,” Paciorkowski said.

The shop serves their own version of classic foods. They have pizza on sourdough crust, sheep milk gelato, yucca fries, specialty coffees and teas and more.

“If you feel you can’t eat dairy anymore, maybe you can eat sheep milk. If you can’t have a proper pizza anymore because you’re gluten free, maybe you can have a sourdough one,” Paciorkowski said. “We’re trying to offer people the knowledge on how they can have healthier and better tasting alternatives on the products they really missed.”

Paciorkowski comes up with his own recipes using minimal ingredients, making everything gluten free and dairy friendly and without any seed oils.

They also source meat from local farmers whose practices fit with the store’s mission.

“We solve a lot of problems that you find in different foods,” he said. “The biggest thing we try to do is avoid spiking blood sugar, ‘cause if the blood sugar spikes too quickly it’ll crash and if you crash, that’s when you get tired and you might not feel so great.”

Staff at Little Lake Market in Puslinch Ont., gather behind the counter for a photo. June 27, 2024. (Stefanie Davis/CTV News)

Zoe Lendvay, a new employee at Little Lake Market, said she wanted to work at the shop as soon as she visited it.

“As someone who deals with chronic illness and autoimmune disease, it’s really cool to be in a place like this that makes food accessible to people,” Lendvay said. “We’re used to all these restrictions and just feeling sad and a lot of being left out and the fear of missing out, so to enjoy food that is accessible is just a really awesome experience.”

Dave Bulten, a regular customer, said some of the items the market staff have introduced him to have been “life changing.”

“They don’t have beer but they had something better, something called kombucha, which we never heard of,” he said. “[Alexander] explained it to us, and that’s it. We love the stuff and it’s an electrolyte and it really helps. We learned more about the things we can take that are healthy, because we’re kind of normal guys that ride hard but we like to be healthy.”

With recipes that are consistently evolving, the Little Lake Market aims to replace food staples with gut friendly alternatives.

“Food is a very intimate thing in our lives,” Paciorkowski said. “We want to make sure the food has a really positive impact – not just on your health, but your wellbeing.”