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4 Fantastic Canadian Products We Love

Great things come out of Canada—we should know! In celebration of the True North, here are just a few of the Canadian products available at London Drugs that we love.

Que Pasa Snacks

Que Pasa chips and salsas are a familiar snack staple to most British Columbians. Joe, Marie and Morris Zallen founded the company in 1983 after opening the popular Topanga Café in Vancouver. The brand expanded quickly into the rest of Canada and the United States in 2012 after being purchased by another successful BC company – Natures’s Path Organic Foods.

Their delicious corn tortilla chips are 100-per-cent whole grain and 100-per-cent organic, with corn from non-GMO kernels rather than purchased ground corn meal. All Que Pasa products are made with organic ingredients because they believe the best tasting (and healthiest) foods come from plants grown in healthy, organic soil. Que Pasa also prides itself on being Zero Waste; their manufacturing facility in Delta, BC, was the first production facility in Canada to be given a Zero Waste Certification from Green Business Certification Inc.

Sugar Sheet Forest-Free Paper

Of course we all want to reduce our consumption of paper products to preserve our valuable forest resources, but we all still have to print sometimes. Recycled paper is a good solution, but what if paper could be made without using any trees at all? Introducing Sugar Sheet – made from the waste fibre generated from sugar cane processing. The bright white, high quality, paper is elemental chlorine-free and completely recyclable. It prints beautifully on inkjet printers, laser printers, copiers and even high quality offset printing presses. Best of all, the price is competitive with other high quality and recycled paper options.

Sugar Sheet is a Canadian company based in New Westminster, BC whose goal is to minimize dependency on global forests to make paper. The paper is made in Colombia from a material that would otherwise be discarded, so it doesn’t have any adverse effects on food production. So, if you want to print and save trees at the same time, your sweetest paper choice is Sugar Sheet.

Holy Crap Cereal

Fans of the Dragons’ Den TV show are already familiar with Holy Crap cereal, and with a name like that, it’s hard to ignore their products on grocery store shelves. The inspiring success story paired with a great product makes Holy Crap easy to love. Married couple Corin and Brian Mullins started Holy Crap in Sechelt, BC in 2009 with a mere $129, selling their artisanal cereal at farmer’s markets and local grocery stores. After pitching on Brian’s favourite show Dragons’ Den, orders went from 100 to 100,000 per week, and the Mullins’ eventually grew it into a $5 million dollar business.

Holy Crap Organic, “the world’s most amazing breakfast cereal,” is certified organic, gluten-free, and non-GMO. Not only is it delightfully tasty, it’s high in fibre, protein, and packed with Omega-3s. Despite catching on like wildfire around the world, Holy Crap, Skinny B and Wild Chia cereals are still made in Gibsons, British Columbia, a rural community outside of Vancouver.

SmartSweets

Another Dragons’ Den success story, SmartSweets was founded to offer adults and kids yummy sweet candies that make for happy taste buds and healthier diets. SmartSweets contain only natural sugars that occur in fruit, with no additional added sugars of any kind. For context, most traditional gummy bears have 24g of sugar and 168 calories per 50g serving, whereas 50g of SmartSweets gummy bears have only 3g of sugar and 90 calories. And unlike other sugar free gummy bears and candies, SmartSweets treats do not contain artificial sweeteners – to make each variety as tasty as can be, natural stevia and fruit are used for flavour.

Did we miss your favourite Canadian product? Tell us about it in the comments!

July Book of the Month

Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Fire gave us power. Gossip helped us cooperate. Agriculture made us hungry for more. Mythology maintained law and order. Money gave us something we can really trust. Contradictions created culture. Science made us deadly.
This is the thrilling account of our extraordinary history – from insignificant apes to rulers of the world. Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our beliefs, our actions, our power… and our future.

Book of the Month
Every month we feature a new book to be showcased in our Book of the Month. Staff members and friends will be reading the book and posting their reviews. We’d love to get see your reviews as well! Post your comments and tell us your thoughts. Sapiens is available at London Drugs along with many other great titles and is on sale for the month of July.

8 BBQ Tips To Make You a Backyard Superstar

Summer is in full swing, and that means your backyard should be ground zero for the majority of your meals for the next few months. Whether it’s the smoky, delicious flavour barbecue provides or just the act of cooking al fresco, BBQing is one of the pleasures of summer. Here are eight tips to help make you the master of the grill.

Brining and injecting aren’t cheating

Master grillers might look down their noses on these methods, but when you’re barbecuing at home, you’re not in a competition. You’re only cheating yourself if you’re not using all the tools at your disposal that will help you get the most flavour out of your meat. Brining (letting the meat soak in salted water for up to 24 hours) and injecting (where you use a syringe to inject flavourful liquids into the meat) helps to ensure that the meat will be moist and tasty. There’s nothing worse than a dry piece of BBQ, so rigging the game for a favourable outcome is just smart cooking.

Smoke it if you’ve got it

If you only have a gas-powered barbecue, it’s perfectly fine – you’ll get effective heat distribution with gas. But if you do have access to charcoal it will give your meat a distinctive and delicious flavour that you just won’t find with gas.

Searing is a waste of time

Just like the idea that you can see the Great Wall of China from space, the idea that searing meat will hold in moisture is a myth. Instead, it’s more likely that searing will cause the fibres of the meat to tighten, which in turn means you’ll lose moisture. The crusty surface that’s formed by searing isn’t waterproof, and therefore won’t hold in any fluids.

Don’t poke your meat

While you might be tempted to use that impressive looking BBQ fork, don’t. If you puncture the meat, you’re letting valuable juices leak out. Instead, use the less cool but far more effective pair of tongs when you need to flip things.

Cook it low and slow

If you know you’re going to be using the grill, plan ahead. If you’re not rushed you will have the ability to cook the meat at a lower temperature for a longer amount of time. The higher the temperatures, the more the fibres of the meat contract, squeezing out moisture and taking away from the flavour of the cut. But if you’re going to grill at low temperatures, make sure you give the meat enough time to cook so that it doesn’t come out raw.

Patience is a virtue

When you’re done grilling, take a few minutes and wait before you cut your meat. We know – it’s tough to sit there salivating when a perfectly cooked piece of steak is sitting right in front of you, but trust that the wait will be worth it. By holding off, you’ll effectively retain a lot of those precious juices you’ve been cultivating from the very beginning. If you cut into the meat right away, those juices will just spill out onto the plate, where they can’t be enjoyed.

Boil? Never.

If you’re looking for the quickest way to rob your meat of flavour, by all means, boil it before putting it on the BBQ. By boiling, you’re losing all of the feat and flavour that provides taste. Even if you’re pressed for time, don’t take this shortcut.

With veggies, speed is key

If you’re cooking veggies on the grill, speed is your friend. Slice your veggies into thin strips and then char along the bars. You don’t have cook them for long to achieve that BBQ appearance and flavour.

If you want to up your BBQ game this summer, London Drugs has everything you need to become a master griller, including barbecues, camp stoves, tools, fuel, and accessories.

4 Tips for Backing Up Your Photos While Travelling

It’s summer time! For many of you that means it’s finally time to jet set somewhere new and enjoy some much-deserved vacation days. You’ll travel by planes, trains and automobiles, cross countries and continents, experiencing incredible new places and taking hundreds of photos.

It’s important to take precautions while on your travels to ensure those irreplaceable photos are kept safe until your return home. Too often, we hear stories of friends or family members who have lost their precious travel photos due to a stolen phone, lost camera, or a damaged memory card. It’s something you hope will never happen, but it’s best to be prepared.

Before you take off on your summer vacation, our LDExperts recommend these tips for backing up and sharing your photos while travelling!

Invest in a Wi-Fi Camera

Left: Sony A5100, Right: Nikon D7500

Wi-Fi cameras are great for backing up your photos on-the-go while travelling. Depending on your preference, London Drugs offers Wi-Fi enabled DSLRs, like the Nikon D7500, as well as Wi-Fi enabled mirrorless cameras, like the Sony A5100. Mirrorless cameras are a particularly good choice for travel, as they are more compact, taking up less space in your bag, and are less conspicuous when out and about.

Just use the Wi-Fi feature and the accompanying smartphone app to send your photos directly to your phone to back them up as you go. You don’t need to have an internet connection for this to work – the Wi-Fi connection is actually just a wireless network connection between your two devices! Once your photos are transferred wirelessly to your phone, you can rest easy knowing that if anything happens to your camera or its SD card, you’ll also have them backed up on your phone.

Learn more about Wi-Fi cameras from our LDExperts Darren and Janice:

Upload & Order Prints From Your Smartphone

Whether you plan to back up your photos from a Wi-Fi camera, or are snapping all your travel photos on your smartphone, you can then easily upload those photos to our free London Drugs Photolab App! The app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store or Google Play, then just upload your photos and order prints on-the-go, wherever you are in the world. No more sifting through hundreds of photos on your return home – all your favourites will already be printed and awaiting pick-up at your local London Drugs (or you can have them shipped and waiting for you at home!).

Plus, if you create your own LDPhotolab account, any photos you upload to order prints of will be saved to your account. So if you happen to drop your phone in the Mediterranean Sea (knock on wood), you’ll still be able to access all those photos through your LDPhotolab account.

Use Multiple SD Cards or Hard Drives

If you plan to take your laptop along on your travels, consider backing up your photos to your laptop, a portable hard drive, flash drive, or multiple SD cards as an extra precaution. Try to do this every evening if you can, so that if something happens to your phone or camera during the next day, you’ll still have all those precious photos backed up.

Some cameras also have dual memory cards built into the camera, such as the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, so that you can automatically save to both cards simultaneously while shooting. Of course, if you’re going to use this method, make sure to put that second card somewhere safe when you can, to avoid losing both of them in one go.

Share Your Travel Photos in a Photobook

Once you’re back home from vacation, you’ll have a whole collection of beautiful travel photos to share! You can create photobooks, customized with vacation templates, and you’ll also be given the opportunity to add text like locations and dates.

Need a little help creating your photobook? Our Photolab Experts are ready to help you with all of your travel photo projects and prints – just visit us at your local London Drugs. Or you can get started right away by uploading your photos to our Photolab website, our London Drugs Photolab App for iOS and Android, or to our in-store Photolab kiosks.

Are Your Photos at Risk? Protecting Your Photos from Damage

You never think it’ll happen to you, until it does. You’ve come home to a flooded basement, or have been victim to a fire, and now realize many of your possessions are damaged or destroyed. The material things are easy to replace, but your photographs are one-of-a-kind. What do you do?

Digital Restoration

Our London Drugs Photolab experts can help bring your damaged photos back to their former glory with our digital restoration service. If you’ve experienced a devastating event in your home, or your photographs just haven’t stood the test of time, let our LDExperts work their magic.

They can digitally edit each individual image to bring back a little colour worn by dust and heat, fill in scratches, or restore parts of the image destroyed by mud and water damage. You’d be amazed what can be restored. Our LDExperts just ask that before bringing in photos with mud and water damage, that you wait until the mud dries, and then very gently brush off the mud as best possible.

Once these photos have been digitized during our restoration process, we recommend not only making a print copy of your restored photo, but ensuring you have the digital file backed up safely as well – to avoid any damage or loss in future.

Be Proactive and Protect Your Photos

Before the worst, plan with the best. Our Photolab makes it easy to keep everything from your baby photos to your wedding photos safe and sound, ensuring the longevity of all those moments preserved by a single snapshot.

The first step to protecting your photos from potential loss or damage is to create digital copies of all print photos. This can be a tedious process, which is why many put off doing it, but we can take care of that. Just pick up a Photo Scanning Box at any London Drugs Photolab location, fill it with up to 800 photographs and documents (up to 8.5”x11”), and bring it back to our Photolab. We’ll do the legwork of digitizing all those photos for you, then we’ll return to you the original photos and a USB drive with all of the digital files.

We recommend safeguarding your digitized photos on at least one other USB or Hard Drive, kept in different locations. Then you can sit back with peace of mind knowing you’ll have a secondary digital backup if one of the hard drives or USBs is damaged or lost.

To protect those original prints, consider relocating them to a safer place in your home. For example, if you live in an area that is susceptible to flooding, consider moving your stash of photos from the basement to an upstairs room. Meanwhile if your area is more susceptible to wildfires, you could protect your most precious photos by keeping them in a fire-resistant safe in the basement.

Have questions about how we can help protect your most important memories? Just speak with any of our LDExperts in the Photolab! Or learn more about our Photo Scanning Box service here.

3 Summer Essentials to Celebrate Canada Day Long Weekend

As a Canadian company, we can’t help but burst with national pride when Canada Day comes around. We have the honour of calling this amazing and beautiful country home, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. What’s more, the Canada Day long weekend also usually feels like the true kick off of summer. And aren’t Canadian summers just the best?

If you’re planning to spend the Canada Day long weekend pool-side, lake-side or beach-side (really, any excuse to enjoy the sun), then you’ll first want to make a stop by our London Drugs Photolab to order your custom-made summer essentials. We’ve just launched brand new beach blankets, beach bags and water bottles: all of which you can add your own personal touch to with your summer photos.

As a special Canada Day offer, you’ll save $19.98 when you purchase all 3 personalized summer essentials together – just $179.99 for the whole package!

Photo Beach Blankets

As you hit the beach (or outdoor pool) for possibly the first time this season, you’ll be all the more excited to roll out your brand new personalized 60″ x 70″ beach blanket. Use some of your favourite summer photos from over the years to decorate it with the help of our Photolab; choose from either a horizontal photo beach blanket, or a vertical photo beach blanket. Even better: toss it over your poolside chair, and everyone will know exactly which spot is yours!

Photo Elegant Water Bottles

If you plan on soaking in the sun over the long weekend, you’ll not only want to be lathering on the sunscreen, but also making sure you and your family stay hydrated. Our new photo elegant water bottle can be personalized with a summer snapshot, and are a perfect addition to your beach bag. Personalize one for each member of your family, and you’ll never fight over whose bottle is whose again.

Photo Beach Bags

Your long weekend summer fun wouldn’t be complete without a beach bag to carry all your essentials, from towels to sunscreen. We’re very excited to now offer quality beach bags which can be customized with a photo of your choice. This also makes a great gift for friends and family who have summer birthdays.

To complete your long weekend packing list, don’t forget your floatie! We have giant swan floats, donut floats, fun pretzel floats, and even the coveted giant unicorn floats that will be the star of all your Instagram pics. And don’t forget – you can order prints of all your Canada Day fun straight from your smartphone with our FREE London Drugs Photolab App for iOS and Android.

Of course, in true Canadian fashion, our incredibly polite (and knowledgeable) Photolab Experts are available in-store to help you with crafting your custom summer beach blankets, water bottles, and beach bags. Just visit us at your local London Drugs!

Our Favourite #CanadianSummer Photos From Instagram

Even though we are lucky to live in Canada, undoubtedly one of the most beautiful places in the world, we are not not lucky enough to have a lot of balmy weather. So, when summer finally does come around every year, we are HERE FOR IT. (Can I get an amen, Alberta?) To give you a tasty appetizer, we thought we’d scour social media to find some of our favourite #CanadianSummer photos.

Sunset Season

No, this isn’t a painting, it’s a real place. Crescent Beach in Surrey, BC, to be precise.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bi0j6PdnRwK/?tagged=canadiansummer

Adventure Dogs

These two Prince Edward Island pals might as well have a speech bubble above that says, “Can you throw the stick again, puh-leeze?!”

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A post shared by Daily Adventure Dogs (@dailyadventuredogs)

The Perfect Chill Spot

The only thing missing from this classic Muskoka scene is a couple of friends to sit with.

Photo by @FLOAT-EH on Instagram

The Boys of Summer

What’s summer without a ball game on a warm night at Vancouver’s Nat Bailey Stadium?

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Vancouver's field of dreams. #natbaileystadium #vancouvercanadians
A post shared by Steve Wong (@stevee.ray_wong) on May 2, 2018 at 11:43pm PDT

Refreshing View

Let’s make a toast to flannel shirts, glassy lakes and cold iced tea.

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A post shared by Nic (@nicoleealmeida)

An Evening Stroll

Doesn’t this rural PEI road look like the perfect spot for a long, leisurely walk down to the water?

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Lovely North Rustico, PEI. Great road behind the beach for a long scenic walk. #discoverpei
A post shared by Sasha Weekes (@sashaweekes) on May 7, 2018 at 11:33am PDT

Majestic Mountains

Sure, Jasper gets a lot of attention during their magnificent winters, but their summers are nothing to sneeze at, either.

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The reflection of mountainous ranges and lines of evergreens in the heart of Canadian wilderness. A part of the Canadian Rockies, Jasper is a perfect destination to those who longed for serenity and peace in the endless summer days.
A post shared by The Mighty Traveler (@themightytraveler) on May 11, 2018 at 5:41pm PDT

Summertime on the Seawall

Vancouver’s Sunset Beach is the closest thing Canada has to a Southern California boardwalk, palm trees included.

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Home turf, Vancouver's West End – English Bay #englishbay #westend #westendbestend #springinthecity #letthesunshine #vancouver #bc #canada #latergram
A post shared by Kotone Frankowksi Doug Abbot (@indefinitelyeverafter) on May 16, 2018 at 4:41am PDT

Freedom!

Remember the feeling of absolute freedom when school got out for summer holidays? It’s not hard to re-capture that feeling at Okanagan Lake in BC.

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A post shared by Dr Hannah Korten (@drhannahkorten)

Road Trip, Anyone?

Who’s got a convertible we can borrow for this perfect slice of Alberta road? We ride at dawn!

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I can’t count how many times I travelled this road as a kid on my way to another fun camping adventure. After seeing @neil_zee work at this location I was inspired to get up early and try for the sunrise. It did not disappoint. Taken Canada day 2017. . . . #canadaday2017 #canada #abparks @alberta_parks @travelalberta #travelalberta #albertaprairies #cypresshills #reesorlake #prairiesunrise @ig_shotz_le #explorecanada #albertaviews #medicinehat @alberta.canada #naturephotography #natureaddict #albertacanada #southernalberta #southernalbertaphotographer #tourismmedicinehat @tourismmedicinehat
A post shared by Doug Hider (@doughider_ab) on Apr 21, 2018 at 9:04am PDT

Do you have a photo that perfectly captures the #CanadianSummer? Why not have it printed and framed to enjoy all year? London Drugs Photolab experts can help you choose the perfect format for your prints.