When Ester Sattler and her husband were visiting friends from the Northern Ontario town of Parry Sound more than a decade ago, they had no idea that their future lay in Canada.

Now, they're on the cutting edge of the food processing industry here, with plans to introduce a new concept which will add to the already impressive growth of their company.

Their ready-made and packaged fresh salads and other foods are sold in stores and supermarkets throughout Ontario, eastern Canada and the eastern seaboard of the United States. "Now, we've made a decision to expand quite dramatically into prepared foods," Ms. Sattler says. "We've developed a few hundred products over the past couple of years. The retail market hasn't been ready for it but, we are getting geared up now to accommodate the demand and there's definitely a demand out there."

"There's always niches in markets."

She was in the produce-processing business in Germany, but she and her husband were looking for a new life elsewhere. "Canada was a coincidence," she remembers. "When we went to visit our friends we couldn't believe what we saw. We just fell in love with the country."

The Sattlers decided to settle in the southern Ontario city of Barrie - 50 minutes from Toronto and within a day's drive of a huge North American market - and introduce their revolutionary produce-processing concept to it. Important to the Sattlers' lifestyle, boating, swimming, and skiing were also on their doorstep. And the transportation system allowed them easy access to North America's heartland.

"It took us years to find consumer acceptance, but the support and the backup of retailers helped a lot:' she says. "It was a scary product for Canadians at first - not understanding what it was in the bag, but finding that it was a fresh and good product, cleaner than you could do in your own home."

Ms. Sattler recalls it was a difficult start-up situation, but then their market exploded. Their first shipment was a decade ago - 500 bags of mixed salad to a supermarket chain. Now they manufacture about 400,000 bags a month of a basic retail line and they have about 15 lines in total. They've expanded three times and are building again to accommodate their new processed foods. "We do about 150 products in produce and about 250 products in prepared foods now that we didn't do when we started," Ms. Sattler says. They started with 8 employees and in 1998 had close to 80.

She believes that starting a business in Canada is much the same as in other markets in that you need to know what you can do. "You need to get your act together properly and you have to put in a lot of hard work," she says. "If you do, chances are you will be successful."

"There's always niches in markets," she adds, "and in the food market, which I know best, there are definitely niches that on other continents are already taken. So I see opportunities - lots of them - in Canada."

In the meantime, the most important thing is that she's enjoying herself. "You want to be able to enjoy as much of the time you're borrowing on the planet as you can," she says. "I do find it more rewarding in that aspect in Canada than I did in Europe. It's more fun."