A Toronto breakfast company is celebrating a pretty surreal kind of delivery: one of its cereals has been picked for the Artemis II mission.
Goldys says the Canadian Space Agency reached out in the summer of 2024. Co-founder Daniel Schreiber said the agency contacted the company to ask whether it was interested in getting its product into outer space. “Ultimately they were looking for something very special for the mission. They were looking for a Canadian product,” he said.
There was a testing phase, then a selection process that the astronauts themselves played a role in. Co-founder Daniel Carson said the cereal was selected to go into space “exactly as is” without any changes to the recipe. Just like you’d buy the product at Sobeys, Metro, Longos or Whole Foods, Carson said that’s how the astronauts were having it.
Around the time the mission returned this week, the details were still settling for the Goldys team. After a nerve-wracking six minutes of lost communication, the astronauts inside the crew capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego, right on schedule at 8:07 p.m. ET. The landing brings the record breaking Artemis II mission around the moon and back to an end after 10 days. Schreiber said the cereal was chosen after it met a specific list of requirements, including a long shelf life that would be usable for other missions, being dense in nutrients without any additives, passing micro-gravity testing to see how it would react in space, and being lightweight.
If that all sounds straightforward on paper, Carson admitted it wasn’t so calm behind the scenes. He said they didn’t want to get their hopes up during the year and a half of testing. Orders from the agency were expected at points throughout that time, from Quebec, Houston and Cape Canaveral. “We have a bit of imposter syndrome at times,” he said. “We didn’t want to get too excited, we weren’t sure how likely it would happen.”
Once the cereal passed the space agency’s checks, Carson said it came down to the astronauts to decide which products they liked best. “They looked at it, tasted it and ultimately chose it,” Schreiber said. Schreiber described the final moment as an email that told them, “Congratulations, you’re approved for space flight and you’ll be joining us on the Artemis mission.”
Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen chose Goldys’ strawberry lavender cereal as his breakfast of choice for the mission. The co-founders—Schreiber and Carson—also traveled to Florida earlier this month to be part of the launch festivities. They described it as nerve-wracking to see if the mission would take place. And when the countdown finally started, Carson said it was “a haunting” moment filled with “awe” and excitement. While they were watching the sky, the air around them in that moment—warm, salty, and strangely loud—didn’t change the fact that the real focus was on safe return home.
Now they’re looking forward to connecting with Hansen for feedback on how the cereal tasted in space. “Did it make him feel good? Did he like it in space? Palates we learned change in space,” Schreiber said. He added that Goldys plans to maintain its relationship with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency to see if the company can join future missions—and maybe even go to Mars one day. “Our seeds have gone further than any seeds before … and even the smallest seed can make the biggest difference.”
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