Arva Flour Mills Limited - "Best flour by a dam site"

Page 2 - Cont'd

"If you're over 25, you've eaten our flour," says Matthews confidently. That's because for 70 or 80 years, the Arva Flour Mill supplied soft white flour to McCormick's here in London. "Every time you picked up an icecream cone, it was Arva flour. Baskin-Robbins' sugar cones too, and the coloured wafer cookies you can get at Loblaws. That was all Arva flour." McCormick's was big business for the mill, but the contract ended in 1985 when its Imperial Cone plant moved to the U.S. following a labour dispute. That was a blow, but the Arva Flour Mill persevered, continuing to make flour "just for the locals", and animal feed for the neighbouring farms, nurturing business out of its little store--a spruced-up former storage area--since 1978.

Much of preserving the Arva mill's identity is simply keeping it viable as a business, and so has not precluded the use of modern tools, such as an automatic debit machine in the store or a fax machine. As for its marketing, there are conventions, press releases and a website to manage. The latter is crucial now that, since February of this year, the Arva Flour Mill is a certified organic miller of wheat, and they want prospective corporate clients everywhere to know about it. "Once our name went into the computer (as being an organic mill), we've had a lot of reaction," says Matthews. An attractive Canadian dollar, coupled with its ability to make organic, "white, white flour," as Matthews calls it, has opened up business for the mill in the U.S. He and his crew now ship locally grown spelt and wheat flour to Buffalo, N.Y., Lansing, Michigan, Annaheim, California, among other places.

In the near future, a rabbi will be coming by the mill to put his blessing on kosher bagel flour they will produce, also destined for an American market. Matthews hopes that in the few months, the 'K' symbol (signifying kosher) will appear on all their four bags. Becoming a certified organic mill is a labour-intensive proposition, and comes with a raft of bureaucratic headaches, what with fending off well-meaning health inspectors who'd like to shine the old place up a bit. The biggest deal by far is vacuuming. Every 21-28 days, every nook and cranny of this 181-year-old mill needs vacuuming to break the breeding cycle of grain-loving moths. Under every sack of feed and flour, every window sill and beam. Although, Matthews laughs, "it breaks my heart to break anyone's breeding cycle," it must be done religiously in lieu of pesticide sprays. Still, if Matthews has been milling regular flour and gets a contract to mill certified organic grain, he has to vacuum and flush out the system of pesticide-treated wheat with up to 800 pounds of the higher-priced, organically grown grain, which he must, in turn, sell for the price of his regular flour (a best-kept secret).

For Matthews, it's all worth the trouble. His previous gigs--at sea with the navy, and as a petrochemical industry inspector--were arduous. To him, the mill has always meant "a good living, and an easy-going pace." But these days, Matthews thinks about retirement and leaving the mill with his three twenty-something children (Julaine, 26, Steven, 24, and Mike, 21), who've dragged hi, scoffing good-naturedly and only half-resisting, into the late 20th century. (To wit: Two jet-skis float in the pond above the mill.) After having briefly entertained notions of starting up a Bellamere-style farm market operation, the Matthews family is happy to have finally found a little niche for the mill in organic. This way, it can continue to do what it's always done best within London's changing landscape.

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This site is owned by Arva Flour Mills Limited, Arva, Ontario, Canada.