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Carbon Cafe caters to the needs (and appetites) of many (4 photos)

Carbon Cafe on Chancellor's Way offers paninis, wraps, baked goods, fresh soups, coffees and smoothies

Guelph's Carol-Ann Betz has a lot on her hands, so why not add a new business to the list.

Betz is the new owner of the Carbon Cafe on Chancellors Way, offering fresh baked goods, paninis, smoothies, wraps, fresh soups and breakfast sandwiches. They also cater.

Vegan and gluten free options are available.

Students making their way to the University of Guelph can go online and put their order in ahead of time.

"I always had a passion and I always wanted to get into the restaurant business," said Betz.

So when the original owners put the business up for sale, she jumped at the chance.

"The door opened and I was like 'oh yeah!,'" she says with a laugh.

"I wanted something different and in this day and age we can reinvent ourselves. I just wanted to do it and I'm one of those people who walk through open doors.

Betz came to the University of Guelph in 1989 and never left.

"It's a great town. It's very diverse. Guelph is dynamic," Betz said of why she never left (her husband, met shortly after graduating, might have also had something to do with it).

She graduated with a degree in landscape architecture and when she's not serving customers at the Carbon Cafe she designs landscapes for high-end swimming pools.

Or busy teaching yoga, serving on the Hillside Festival board, planning a charitable effort to build a well for a village in Nicaragua or checking in on her three teenage children.

"It keeps life interesting and it keeps me engaged," she said of her busy lifestyle.

Betz's great-grandmother was a restaurateur and she learned her baking skills from her grandmother.

"My grandmother taught me how to bake pies, cookies, bread, everything. I loved it. I absolutely loved it."

Her two youngest children are sensitive to gluten so she baked a lot of her own food when they were younger.

The cafe serves fresh food, most of it made on site. As the name indicates, they are environmentally conscious, offer a 20 cent discount if you bring your own mug or container, use recyclable straws and very little plastic.

Its customers are students, the people coming to the medical building and those that work there, people down the street (at the nearby public health headquarters) and then we cater," Betz said of where the business comes from.

Carbon Cafe is located in the bottom of the Chancellors Way Medical Arts Centre on Chancellors way. Its hours are currently 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Friday, but they will start opening a little earlier once the students return.

More information and a full menu can be found at www.carboncafe.ca.


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Tony Saxon

About the Author: Tony Saxon

Tony Saxon has had a rich and varied 30 year career as a journalist, an award winning correspondent, columnist, reporter, feature writer and photographer.
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