RICE PRODUCTION ON A ROLL
Dainty Foods invests in local plant
Cars, whisky — and rice?
Few people realize it but Windsor is home to the only rice mill in Canada. Dainty Foods has invested $3 million on equipment in its 50-year-old mill on Windsor’s west side in the last two years.
The mill at Broadway Boulevard off Ojibway Parkway processes about 50,000 tonnes of rice a year — around 110 million pounds — and packages 10 kinds of dry rice, a canned rice and rice flour making a case for Windsor being the rice capital of Canada.
“When I talk to friends and families and I tell them that I work in a rice mill in Canada, they are taken aback by that,” general manager Bashir Mohamed said Thursday. “They don’t even know that existed in Canada.”
On Thursday, a 1,000 kilogram bag of rice from Thailand was starting its journey inside the fivestorey plant while a freight train carrying long grain rice from Arkansas dropped its load onto an underground conveyor belt that feeds 24 silos.
The Hom Mali rice from Thailand will be sold as a premium jasmine rice, he said. Rice is shipped to Montreal from India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, and then trucked to Windsor.
Mohamed said few people realize rice is grown in the southern United States, including in Arkansas (the largest U.S. rice growing area), California, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi and Texas. The mill was built in Windsor in 1967 to be close to the American border.
People who drive past the mill daily and see the Dainty sign don’t realize it’s all about rice and a 135-year-old Canadian business, said Nikola Reford, a Dainty Foods marketing manager in Montreal.
“We really want to get the word out that we are in Windsor and we’re proud to be doing this and having a Canadian brand,” she said.
Nikola’s great-great-grandfather, Robert Reford, was an Irish immigrant who arrived in Canada at the age of 14. He apprenticed in the grocery business in Montreal in 1866 and started a shipping business that still exists but is no longer in the family.
In 1882, he bought a flour mill in Montreal and converted it to the Mount Royal Rice Mills. At the time, rice was being shipped to the east and west coasts of Canada from all over the world and a large tariff on U.S. rice made it advantageous to have a rice mill in Canada.
Dainty Foods — the Dainty brand was created in 1947 — was sold in 2015 to the French company Marbour,
The Montreal mill was closed when the Windsor mill was built. Today, it has about 80 employees in Windsor and 15 at its Montreal headquarters, and sales that reached $50.7 million in 2016.
Dainty Foods is celebrating its 135-year history by rebranding and repackaging its rice that’s only sold in Canada. The company invested about $1.5 million this year and $1.5 million in 2016 for new machinery and plant upgrades, Reford said.
That included a new packaging line for block bottom bags. The new rice bags stand up on the shelf and are more visible than the flat, clear bags of rice.
To help consumers learn more about the 10 different kinds of dry rice sold by Dainty and how to cook them, there are different banner colours, such as pink for basmati rice on the new aqua bags of rice. There’s more descriptions on each bag such as the “pearly white and delicately fragrant” jasmine rice. Dainty Foods also teamed up with Quebec chef Jonathan Cheung to develop rice recipes for its website and Facebook page.
The mill also cans cooked rice for sale with a spice pouch. The canned rice has been in the Dainty line for decades and has a loyal fan base for its convenience, she said. The plant also packages rice for private labels and food services and sells rice flour in bulk.
Rice has benefitted in the last decade from the increased interest in gluten-free food, she said. And as different kinds of rice appear on store shelves, people are experimenting with them. Basmati, jasmine and brown rice are the top three sellers, she said.
“It’s just a simple, natural product and it’s so versatile. You can eat it with all kinds of things and you can transform it into all kinds of things. Just about every ethnic background uses rice in different ways.”
The mill removes the bran layer. Nikola said all rice is white at its core. Brown or whole-grain rice doesn’t have its bran layer removed.
Once the rice moves into the mill by conveyor belts, or by bags if its from overseas, the rice is cleaned and sent to be sifted and ground into flour or for dry rice, it goes through polishing and more machines from sifters to optical sorters that remove any debris. The rice essentially polishes itself as it is agitated and the mill doesn’t add salt or preservatives to the 100 per cent natural product.
It’s just a simple, natural product and it’s so versatile. You can eat it with all kinds of things.