There is something wonderfully fitting about meeting Ratana and Arran Stephens at Shalimar Gardens.
Their Vancouver home is beautiful, but it is the kind of beauty that reveals itself in details. Outside, the garden is alive with what the couple has spent a lifetime advocating for: food grown close to the earth. Tomatoes ripen on the vine, grapes hang in clusters, blueberries grow alongside an abundance of fresh produce. The organic philosophy that built their family business is not confined to a cereal box or corporate mission statement. It quite literally grows in their backyard.
Inside, another part of Arran’s life covers the walls. His paintings are everywhere, reminders that long before he became one of Canada’s best-known organic food pioneers, he was an artist and poet (www.arransart.org). Among them, one catches the eye immediately: a beautiful rendering of his and Ratana’s wedding, painted by Arran himself. And then there is chai.
Over a warm cup, conversation moves easily between the past and the present, between India and Canada, business and family, health, environment and food, and eventually, the decision that has brought renewed attention to the Stephens family.
In June 2026, Ratana and Arran Stephens made a $40-million gift to Simon Fraser University’s new medical school, the largest single donation in SFU’s history. In recognition of their contribution, it has been named the SFU Stephens Family School of Medicine. The school, Western Canada’s first entirely new medical school in nearly 60 years, welcomed its inaugural class in August 2026.
A gift of that magnitude might suggest years of elaborate planning. Ratana remembers its beginning rather differently. The idea, she shares, came to her one day while thinking about the health-care challenges facing Canadians and the critical shortage of doctors—especially family physicians. If part of the problem was that Canada needed more physicians, she wondered, why not help train more of them here?
She took the thought to Arran. His response, she recalls with a smile, was practical: did she have the money? She did, thanks to her shrewd investments. And so began conversations with SFU that eventually grew into a $40-million commitment to medical education, research, innovation, community impact and the infrastructure required to build a new generation of physicians.
Behind the lightness with which the story is told is something much deeper. At this stage in their lives, the Stephens are thinking not simply about what they have built, but what can continue long after them. “We see this not simply as a donation,” they say, “but as an investment in generations we may never meet.”
Two Lives, One Philosophy
Their journey to Shalimar Gardens began in two remarkably different worlds.
Arran was born on Vancouver Island in 1944 and spent his early childhood close to the land. His father, Rupert Stephens, was a captain in the First World War, a berry farmer and songwriter. From him came a lesson that Arran carried through life: “Always leave the soil better than you found it.”
Years later, that childhood teaching would evolve into the philosophy at the heart of their businesses:
Always leave the Earth better than you found it.
But business was hardly the obvious destination for young Arran. His interests were art, poetry, spirituality, organic agriculture, and daily practice of silent meditation. In the 1960s, his spiritual search took him to India, where he spent seven months studying with his beloved teacher, Sant Kirpal Singh Ji Maharaj (1894-1974). When he returned to Vancouver in 1967, he had virtually no money. What he did have was conviction. He opened the Golden Lotus on West 4th Avenue, Canada’s very first vegetarian restaurant.
Ratana’s beginnings were shaped by an entirely different kind of upheaval. Born Ratan Mala Bagga in Lahore in 1946, she was only ten months old when Partition forced her family to flee the city and rebuild their lives in India. She grew up watching her father create something from nothing, learning from him not only the mechanics of entrepreneurship but, as she remembers, “how to treat others with compassion.”
Education became her anchor. At a time when girls and women faced significant social and economic barriers, Ratana earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and Sanskrit, followed by a master’s degree in English literature from Agra University, and became a college lecturer.
Then, in 1969, two lives converged.
Arran and Ratana met through an arranged marriage setup and were married according to Sikh rites in Delhi. Ratana soon came to Canada, and together they began building a family—and, although neither could have known it then, a pioneering organic company that would help transform how North Americans related to food, as well as understanding the negative impact of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and GMOs on human health and the environment. They raised four children: Arjan, Jyoti, Gurdeep, and Shanti.
In 1971, came LifeStream Natural Foods retail supermarket (nine years before Whole Foods). Then, in 1985, came Nature’s Path Organic Foods.
At the time, “organic” was nowhere near the cultural vocabulary it occupies today. Ingredients were difficult to source, consumers had to be convinced, and the Stephens were competing with global food corporations having resources far beyond their own, but they persisted. Nature’s Path grew from a modest family enterprise into North America’s leading independent organic cereal and snack company, with products reaching more than 50 countries. Through it all, Nature’s Path, and sister company Que Pasa remained family-owned despite, the Stephens say, more than a hundred offers to sell out over the past 20 years.
The reason seems clearer after spending time with them. For Ratana and Arran, Nature’s Path was never merely something they owned. It stood for what they believed. Healthy people, they maintain, depend on healthy food. Healthy food depends on healthy soil. And business, if it is going to occupy so much of a person's life, should serve something beyond itself.
When Giving Becomes a Way of Living
Philanthropy, in the Stephens household, did not suddenly arrive with the SFU announcement. It has been threaded through their lives for decades.
Their family and company have supported food banks, hospitals, universities, environmental organizations, organic farmers, community gardens, and programs addressing hunger and food insecurity. Over the 20 years through 2024, Nature’s Path reports contributing more than $81.7 million in food and cash, including approximately $57 million in organic food to food banks across Canada and the United States.
Some gifts have also been deeply personal. In 2011, Arran became seriously ill and underwent a living-donor liver transplant at Vancouver General Hospital. His daughter Gurdeep was his donor. For a family accustomed to giving, this was giving in its most intimate form: a daughter giving part of herself so her father could live. Following the father-daughter recovery, Ratana and Arran donated $1 million to VGH’s liver transplant clinic to provide critically needed liver diagnostic equipment, and another $1 million to support the work of VGH’s Gastroenterology Department.
Additionally, they have been the lead donor to the Vancouver Coastal Health Withdrawal Center, helping with addiction recovery in a safe and clean environment, as well as to St. Paul’s Wellness Garden.
Perhaps experiences like these explain why their philanthropy feels less transactional than instinctive. Health, education, food, environment - on paper, they may appear to be separate causes. In the Stephens’ worldview, they are interconnected. The food we grow affects the bodies we inhabit. Education changes what becomes possible. Medicine gives families more time. The environment sustains all of it.
The new medical school brings many of those threads together. Its vision of community-based care resonated strongly with the family, particularly its broader understanding of health through nutrition, prevention, Indigenous knowledge and care for the whole person.
For its first class of 48 medical students, the significance will be immediate. But for Ratana and Arran, the real impact may unfold over decades: in physicians trained, communities served, discoveries made, and patients whose names they will never know.
That anonymity does not diminish the value of giving. It appears to be precisely the point. “We are in the sunset years of our lives,” they reflect, acknowledging they may not live to see the full fruition of everything they are planting. “But that does not make planting them any less important—perhaps it makes it more important.”
Planting for the Next Generation
There is a literalness to that metaphor when you walk through Shalimar Gardens.
Seeds are planted without any guarantee of what each season will bring. They are tended anyway. The same can be said of the legacy company the Stephens built. Nature’s Path is now moving into its next generation, with their son Arjan serving as President and daughter Jyoti as Senior Vice President. Ratana and Arran remain involved through the continuing fiduciary board, but there is evident satisfaction in watching something they started beyond them. “A family business has real meaning when its values can survive its founders,” they say.
Those values are visible throughout their home. They are in the garden outside. In Arran’s paintings on the walls. In the wedding portrait that quietly holds a younger version of the couple who would spend more than half a century building a life together. In the stories of four children raised alongside a growing business. And in the warmth with which they speak about giving: not as something reserved for people with enormous wealth, but as a responsibility that can take many forms.
Their advice to those coming after them begins with purpose. “Find a purpose greater than yourself.” Do not be afraid to start small, they say. Persevere. Stay humble. Be kind. Take time for silence and reflection. And, ultimately, give back. It is difficult not to see their own story inside that advice.
Arran once returned to Vancouver from India with almost nothing and opened a vegetarian restaurant. Ratana arrived in Canada after a childhood shaped by displacement, resiliency, and a fierce pursuit of education. Together, they entered an industry in which their ideas were once considered fringe and built a company around them. Today, they possess the ability to write a $40-million cheque. Yet sitting with them at Shalimar Gardens, the number somehow becomes only part of the story.
The greater story is what they have chosen to do with what life gave them. “We came into this world with nothing, and ultimately, we leave with nothing,” they say. “Between those two moments lies our opportunity to serve.”
Perhaps that is the simplest way to understand Ratana and Arran Stephens. Their legacy is not only Nature’s Path or a medical school bearing their family name. It is a way of measuring a life—not by how much one manages to gather, but by what remains useful to others when one is gone.
As our conversation winds down at Shalimar Gardens, surrounded by paintings, memories, and a garden still producing its harvest, the philosophy Arran first learned from his father feels less like a corporate motto and more like the story of two lives. Leave the Earth better than you found it.
For Ratana and Arran Stephens, they are still working on it.
