FLOUR JUST THE START
Values drive bakery café
In an era of the rich chasing unprecedented profits, you have to cheer for small businesses like Flourist.
When Janna Bishop and Shira McDermott opened Flourist in the Cedar Cottage neighbourhood, values led.
“It was a commitment and the general notion of using business as a force for good,” as Bishop put it.
I'd visited Flourist, a coffee shop/ bakery, shortly after it opened just over a year ago. I loved the feel right out of Kinfolk magazine, the homey baking, locally roasted coffee, and light meals.
The foundation for Flourist had been laid by their former company, Grain, which sold fresh, 100 per cent traceable dried grains and beans, bypassing the commodity market supply chain. Bishop and McDermott hooked up with Canadian prairie farmers for supplies of lentils, farrow, chickpeas, quinoa and wheat berries. Chefs and quality-minded home bakers were thrilled.
Bishop previously worked at Mountain Equipment Co-op as a clothing designer and McDermott was involved in the food wholesale industry. McDermott's blog, In Pursuit of More, won gold for Best Food Blog and her Instagram account (Shiramcd) has close to 590,000 followers — and both have lots of her vegetarian recipes.
In 2015, the pair bought a $25,000 stone mill from Austria capable of milling 200 pounds of flour an hour and were prepared to sell fresh-milled, traceable unbleached wheat flour without additives, and with the valuable germ intact, preserving nutrition and unsaturated fatty acids. But oops! It was the first such artisan flour mill in the city and City Hall had a brain freeze, holding up the milling for two years.
“In huge operations, yes, flour dust can be dangerous,” says Bishop.
“They'd never seen an operation as small as ours and they treated us the same as Rogers flour mill and we couldn't find a space to build such an infrastructure. The administration was not supportive, contrary to what politicians say about supporting local.”
So the company focused on grains and beans while they navigated city hall for those two years.
Then the pandemic hit six months after the mill roared to life, and like other food and drink establishments in the city, Flourist pivoted to online and takeout.
Demand for fresh-milled flour was huge before COVID-19, but after it triggered a baking tsunami.
“We sold out of three weeks of production in one hour,” says
Bishop. “We increased production by 200 per cent and couldn't meet demand. “Ultimately, our customers say they can digest our flour. Conventional flour isn't traceable, has additives, treatments and things happen that aren't disclosed on labels.”
Lucille, the sourdough starter, was named after the matriarch in the Arrested Development TV series.
Their online store includes not only flour and grains but popular baked goods including breads, buns, cookies, fruit and savoury galettes, cakes, cookies and prepared foods such as jams, sauces, dips, veggie burgers, salads, and pastry dough. Deliveries are free.
They added premium grocery items that include cheese, honey, olive oil, chocolate, spices, eggs, coffee, wine and cider, mostly local.
“We work with suppliers that extend that same mentality as we do to grains,” says Bishop.
They added kitchen resources such as cookbooks, linen tea towels, pasta and bread-making tools.
Alessandra Percival, the head baker, has previously worked at Matchstick and The Birds & The Beets, and Cheryl O'Shea, in charge of the savories, comes from The Arbor, a vegetarian restaurant.
Since I couldn't visit Flourist for a sit-down coffee or lunch any time soon, I put in a next-day delivery order for broccoli cheese galette, veggie burger patties, a sourdough boule, late local strawberries, and water buffalo yogurt.
My bad, I clicked the wrong galette filling and got a peach ricotta cheese galette ($16 for single, $40 for family size) instead of the broccoli cheese.
The veggie patties ($10 for four) were made with organic pinto beans, mushrooms, herbs and other vegetables — real food as opposed to some of the things that go into meat mimickers.
The sourdough boule, at $6, is really well priced for quality artisan bread, and the water buffalo yogurt from Tesfa Farm in the Fraser Valley was creamy and luscious.
It was a perfect trifecta with the late local strawberries and a drizzle of honey.
If you're staying close to home during this pandemic, I'd suggest you need some baked treats or a galette and salad from Flourist. Or some milledto-order flour to bake yourself something wicked!
The Flourist website offers recipes in tandem with its online products.
And with Thanksgiving around the bend, they'll have everything for a Thanksgiving meal except the turkey, says Bishop.