A finished tin of spruce gum weighs 35 grams. What you don't see when you hold one is the road that came before it.

Our spruce gum doesn't begin with a shipment of ingredients arriving at a warehouse. It begins with us loading the vehicle, heading west and spending the day looking for resin in Alberta's forests. Some harvesting trips mean more than nine hours of driving before the resin ever makes it home.

First, We Have to Find It

Wild resin isn't lined up neatly waiting to be collected. We walk, look at trees, check old wounds and learn the landscape. Years of doing this changes what you notice.

We harvest resin the tree has already produced rather than cutting or tapping trees to force new resin. Some trees give us a little. Occasionally we find extraordinary old deposits. Knowing what is worth collecting — and what should simply be left alone — is part of the skill.

A Harvest Day Is Still a Day in the Woods

There are buckets, gloves and tools, but there are also muddy trails, lunch cooked outside and all the things that distract us along the way.

And then there are mushrooms. I am almost incapable of walking past an interesting patch of mushrooms without stopping to look. A resin trip is rarely only a resin trip around here.

Personally Harvested, Start to Finish

We personally harvest the resin used in our gum. Experience helps us recognize productive areas, choose worthwhile deposits and bring home the resin we want to work with.

It keeps us connected to the material from the forest onward — we know where it came from because we were there.

Why We Still Harvest It Ourselves

Harvesting our own resin takes more time and a lot more travel, but we prefer it that way.

One of the biggest reasons is that we're there. We can move between many different harvesting locations rather than relying heavily on one area, and we make the decisions about each tree and each deposit ourselves. We can take what makes sense to take, leave what should be left, and make sure trees aren't being stripped simply because more resin would be convenient.

For us, respectful harvesting matters just as much as bringing resin home. We don't mind driving farther, walking farther or visiting multiple areas if that's what allows us to harvest in a way we're comfortable with.

Buying resin in bulk would be a very different sourcing model. There are businesses where that approach makes sense, but for Alberta Wildcraft, being the people in the forest gives us something we value more: direct control over how our resin is harvested and the ability to stand behind the way it was collected.

The Forest Comes Home With Us

Raw resin does not arrive looking anything like the gum in a finished tin. It comes home with bark, needles, bits of wood, dirt and whatever else was attached to it in the forest.

This is where the journey changes from fieldwork to preparation. The resin is sorted, cleaned and carefully prepared in batches using the process we've developed through years of working with spruce and pine pitch.

Every Harvest Behaves a Little Differently

Wild resin isn't an industrial ingredient made to a fixed specification. Colour, hardness and texture can vary between trees, locations and harvests. We work with the resin in front of us, checking the batch as it moves through preparation and looking at the qualities that matter when it is eventually chewed.

Then It Starts Looking Like Spruce Gum

After preparation, the difference is dramatic. The rough material that came out of the forest becomes smooth prepared gum that can be portioned, checked and packed.

This is another part customers don't usually see. A finished tin may be small, but batches are prepared and packed in meaningful quantities. Personally harvested and small-batch are descriptions of how we work — not synonyms for making only a few pieces at a time.

Before It Leaves: Every Batch Gets Tested

I personally test every batch of spruce gum that leaves my shop. Quality control isn't based on appearance alone — the gum has to actually behave like gum.

Throughout each batch, I use a standard quality-control testing method with randomized samples taken from different parts of the batch. I test the finished gum for the chewing characteristics I expect before it is cleared for packing and sale.

From Pieces to Tins

The gum is portioned into tins, labeled and packed here in Alberta. By this point the resin has travelled from a tree, into our harvest containers, down kilometres of road, through our workspace and finally into the package a customer sees.

What a Tin Doesn't Show You

Somewhere behind that 35-gram tin are long drives, kilometres on foot, dirty gloves, resin-covered tools, family days in the woods, mushroom detours, raw material that looks nothing like chewing gum, and a lot of hands-on work after we get home.

That's the part of Alberta Wildcraft that is difficult to communicate with a product photo. The finished tin is tidy. The journey absolutely is not.

And that's exactly why we keep documenting it.