Flour power
High Tide Milling Company hopes to grow into ‘purpose-built’ facility in Tignish
A Christopher Cross resident is lining up local grain producers and getting set for a pre-Christmas opening of a flour mill in Tignish.
Area farmers are already familiar with the location Sean McGivern has chosen to start up his milling operation; he’s leasing the Tignish Co-op’s former feed mill at 203 Park Lane. He was already looking for a suitable building when he learned the mill was closing, he said.
McGivern relocated to P.E.I. last year after his family sold its milling operation in Ontario. He still runs North Valley Ag and Mill Equipment which sells and sets up agricultural and food processing equipment, including milling equipment.
While McGivern continues to supply customers with flour through a third-party milling company, he says his High Tide Milling Company in Tignish will be “a totally new stand-alone enterprise on its own, going for new customers and new markets.” “I just wanted a name that connected to the community and the land here,” McGivern said of the name he’s given to his new company.
“A lot of people are used to mill ponds, where they needed the water table to be high to run the waterwheels for the old flour mills,” he said, before pointing out the modern-day mills are quite compact compared to the ones from a century ago. McGivern has a two-year lease on the Park Lane building which he expects will give him enough time to get a purpose-built facility up and running somewhere in West Prince. In the meantime, he’s installing full-scale equipment, but he is setting it up in such a way that it can be easily moved to a purpose-built facility he hopes to have ready somewhere in West Prince by the time his two-year-lease at Park Lane is up.
“The only difference is, we have to add a few different conveyance augers to move some stuff where normally we’d use gravity on everything,” he explained.
He’s installing an air-swept hammer mill. Negative air then pulls the flour up to a cyclone which discharges the product into a sifter. It’s a closed system so there’s no dust.
He plans to hammer mill wheat, barley, spelt and rye and will produce white, light and whole grain flour.
McGivern said he will be selling to customers directly from the mill and expanding to retail stores as the product becomes known. “We want to get a product, get it up and running and then show people the product,” he said. “We need the product in the bag and on the shelf.” Custom milling can also be arranged. He has two part-time workers helping him with the set-up and expects to employ one full-time and one part-time employee once the mill is operational.
The number of employees is expected to increase once he has a purpose-built facility, he said, where he can expand into valueadded products such as mixes and pastas.
“We are just trying to create some local jobs in the community, and I think people like to support local farmers, too,” McGivern commented.
He sees it as important to produce food items here rather than export out the raw product and import back the finished product. “People are buying flour products anyway, then why not buy local products if we can be competitive in that market?” he reasons.