Located just outside of the quiet, crossroads town of Beeton, Ontario, a short drive away from Toronto, Mark Hayhoe’s milling gem is keeping an integral part of our food system alive and well. On an average day, K2 Milling’s grinding machinery can alchemize up to 1500 kilograms of flour an hour before its further transformed into products like artisanal breads, pastas, gourmet crackers, and celebrated distills.
Working in the food business goes back four generations in the Hayhoe family. In Canada it all started with R.B. Hayhoe Foods in 1891, a coffee and tea importing and spice milling business ran by Mark’s grand-father and great uncles near Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market. About 45 years later, in 1935, Mark’s grandfather, Harold, would finish his engineering degree at the University of Toronto smack dab in the middle of the depression. Harold couldn’t return home and work with his father and two uncles, there just weren’t any jobs.
Rather than feeling down on his luck, Mark’s grandfather found an old, abandoned flour mill for sale in Pine Grove and, with the help of his father, purchased the mill and got it running again. He worked there for the rest of his life, and eventually with his son, Mark’s father, who started working there in 1963. Mark was born and went on to study agribusiness at the University of Guelph. As soon as he wrote his last exam, Mark had to quickly return home to help out his father who was in poor health because of an illness.
His father’s deteriorating health pulled the freshly graduated Mark further into the world of milling. Mark soon found himself with a lot on his plate, being responsible for 20 mill employees, overseeing sales, and all other management duties of Hayhoe Mills. The mill continued to succeed and grow, and it even became Canada’s very first certified organic flour mill in 1995.
Time went on, and Mark realized he wanted to branch out on his own and create something that wasn’t run-of-the-mill. Wanting to be closer to the actual milling aspect of operating a flour mill, he made his mind up to sell Hayhoe Mills in 2007, by then the largest certified organic one in Canada. He also saw changes in the customers around him, and he wanted to provide people with more nutritious and flavourful flours. “More and more of our customers were asking for different flours than just white or whole wheat,” he recalls.
Anticipating that starting a new business would be like climbing a mountain, Mark explains how a twin-peaked Himalayan mountain almost as high as Mount Everest, but way tougher to climb, lays claim to the name and logo of K2 Milling. Now into its ninth year of operation, K2 Milling does both custom and merchant milling for various customers and has milled over 200 types of flour. Mark also wanted to create an ecologically responsible and comprehensive flour mill, so all the mill’s electricity is produced on-site.
“Everybody has a choice three times a day to build the food system they want,” says Mark. “When you open your wallet, you’re voting. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s true.”
The mill’s metal machinery grinds and turns all kinds of grains—like corn, barley and rye—and even dried blueberries, grapes, chickpeas and cauliflowers into flours five days a week. Traditional wheat flours make up less than 30% of the mill’s daily grind. A wheel with about 8 different classes of wheat rests beside a small pile of different flours, one of them a dark purplish colour, dried blueberry flour, on the wooden counter inside the mill’s cozy grain trove.
K2 Mill’s popularity is growing, and Mark’s finding his schedule booked more and more for group tours, like culinary students from Toronto’s George Brown College. One upcoming tour has been planned by Slow Food Toronto on September 18 from 2 – 4pm. You can read more about Mark and the innovative K2 Milling at http://k2milling.blogspot.ca/.