Grant Macmillan guards his recipe for gluten-free bread the way world leaders guard nuclear secrets.
There may be five capable employees at new Toronto bakery Aidan’s Gluten Free, but only co-founder Macmillan knows it all: the exact ratio of gluten-free flours, the precise temperatures that produce his distinctive bagels, baguettes, buns and pizza dough. Nothing comes out of his north Toronto baking facility without him there.
“I’ve had customers ask for the recipe if they live way out in Sudbury or something, and I’m like, ‘No,’” says the 46-year-old firmly. “I won’t tell anybody. It’s like the KFC secret recipe.”
In the GTA’s $17 billion food processing industry, the stakes are high. That goes double in emerging markets such as gluten-free. With more people diagnosed with wheat gluten sensitivities each year, demand is growing, but baking without wheat gluten remains a riddle for most manufacturers. Uncommon flours derived from arrowroot, rice and potatoes must be blended at just the right ratios — and there are as many recipes out there as there are chefs. Worse, frustrated consumers are the first to tell you that most commercial gluten-free breads are straight up awful — think dense, powdery bricks of “bread” that taste nothing like their namesakes.
Macmillan’s formula, his customers testify, is different. His bread tastes like bread — golden, crusty baguettes and chewy bagels. Aidan’s business has boomed since it began in 2008, and it now supplies dozens of health food stores across the GTA, including Whole Foods. Macmillan has even gotten inquiries from buyers in California.
Success can be a liability, though. Wary of industrial espionage, Macmillan keeps his bakery’s address hush-hush. Innovators like Macmillan are the vanguard, tinkering with niche products such as sprouted grain granola or bacon cupcakes — experiments that become trends to be snapped up or imitated by big-name brands.
He’s also heard rumours about the mischief rival food producers engage to ruin upstarts like him. There are horror stories of wheat flour dumped anonymously into gluten-free air ducts, contaminating everything.
“Just something I’ve heard loosely, I don’t know how real it is,” he says. “But I think it’s prudent not to let our competitors know everything that we’re doing.” He won’t even say how many loaves he churns out in a day, lest his rivals get a sense of the specialty market’s potential.
One strains to imagine high-stakes sabotage at a bakery. It might be just a scary tale small food producers tell each other in the dark. Yet it highlights the fiercely competitive reality of the booming agri-food industry in Toronto, which has become the number one manufacturing sector in the GTA. It may not attract as much attention as the city’s restaurant scene or as much hand-wringing as the struggling auto parts industry, but food processing — boxed apple pies, bottled BBQ sauces, shrink-wrapped chicken breasts, and on and on — is one of our most triumphant sectors, employing more than 55,000 people in the megacity and 114,000 in Ontario, according to Statistics Canada data. The GTA has the second-largest food-processing industry in North America, behind only Los Angeles.
The industry’s success isn’t new. The GTA food processing business has grown steadily at a minimum rate of five per cent a year for decades. What’s interesting is it has boomed even more over the last three to five years, all through the economic downturn, benefiting from the strong dollar and the fact that food is a necessity. The trait has earned it the ultimate label, “recession-proof” — a rarity in Ontario’s hard-hit manufacturing sector.
To the city, the food industry has another label: green. One of the recommendations of the Toronto Food Strategy is to make food the centrepiece of Toronto’s emerging green economy, says Michael Wolfson, the city’s food and beverage sector expert.
Toronto food processing has been buoyed by multiple factors. The rising dollar has helped local producers expand and buy equipment.
“I don’t think I would have relished creating this business when the dollar was 60 cents or so a decade ago,” says Macmillan.
Access to public transit and a rich local labour pool have recently begun attracting companies back to the downtown core that had previously been lured to the suburbs by lower tax rates, says Wolfson.
Different levels of government have looked for ways to boost the sector further. A municipal tax increment equivalent grant was introduced about a year and a half ago, which waives certain fees for industrial developers looking to build in targeted neighbourhoods. The province recently made food processors a priority for project funding through the Rural Economic Development Fund.
In 2007, the city launched something slightly more radical: the Toronto Food Business Incubator project, meant to assist new food processors in finding their feet while minimizing their risk. Enrolled startups were given the use of a 2,200 square foot commercial kitchen and got to rub shoulders with industry mentors, including Dufflet Rosenberg of Dufflet Pastries and a Longo’s rep that gave pointers on how to approach retailers. The venture has borne fruit. Four “graduates” have independent businesses — including Aidan’s Gluten Free — and 12 new startups are currently enrolled.
“It allowed us to refine our recipes and processes in a proper environment more typical of a production kitchen,” says Macmillan, who admits he had zero food business experience when he started out, beyond a stint at McDonald’s when he was a teen. He started baking after switching his family to a gluten-free diet to help his son, Aidan, manage his autism, but found wheat-free breads on health food shelves “abysmal, just unpalatable.”
The GTA’s food sector has benefited from evolving American tastes, which are trending towards specialty and ethnic eats — a demand that Toronto’s cultural diversity has made it uniquely suited to produce. It’s a strength that was acknowledged by a recent federal government report on Canadian specialty food sales to the Northeastern U.S., says Wolfson.
“What they discovered was that the immigrant population in the GTA has more…” — Wolfson searches for the right word — “authenticity than the same immigrant population in the U.S,” he says.
“When people go to the U.S. they want to Americanize everything they produce. Here we tend to keep our cultural dishes very similar to the way they were produced in their countries of origin. Which means if you really want authentic Indian food, you would buy it from an Indian food manufacturer in the Toronto area, as opposed to buying it from someone in, say, Nashville.”
Toronto’s food processing sector garnered headlines last year when data showed that in 2008, its employment numbers upstaged those of the city’s ailing auto industry, whose jobs plummeted between 2004 and 2009. But good-news stories such as the Globe and Mail’s “Meals trumps wheels” missed an opportunity to dispel stereotypical notions of food jobs as bottom-of-the barrel labour, says Wolfson.
“Most people think it’s a poor-paying, last-resort industry to work in. That’s not the case,” he says, lamenting online commenters who wailed that “sweatshop” food work couldn’t replace highly compensated auto jobs. In 2008, Toronto food and beverage sector wages averaged $20.59 per hour, only $1.30 less per hour than the auto sector average. Because of the food handling skills required — and the dangers of food recalls — minimum-wage positions are rare, even at the entry level.
“It’s not just the I Love Lucy [clich of] packing chocolates on the production line,” he says. “A line supervisor at a production plant makes $50,000 to $60,000 a year. A plant manager makes $100,000.”
That being said, there is plenty of assembly-line work at Toronto’s remaining blue-collar hubs, such as the whitewashed, three-storey Quality Meats Packagers factory, nestled at the sloping foot of Niagara St. in midst of trendy King and Portland condoland. The second-largest pork processor in the province, employing 750, was there long before the condos, built nearly a century ago to process the many animals being shipped to the growing city.
The plant — with its barn for, yes, live pigs, its abattoir and its processing area — is a big employer for the local immigrant population, says Quality Meats spokesperson Jim Gracie.
Entry-level workers packing boxes there have access to training programs to become butchers and earn a little more, or move up to become supervisors.
Blue-collar food jobs hold one serious advantage over the auto industry: a lost job is not a lost career. There are more than 3,000 food processing companies in Ontario compared to six major auto manufacturers and 450 auto parts manufacturers.
“When a food processor runs into problems and closes its doors, the employees usually get scooped up in a short period of time,” says Wolfson. “If a car manufacturer goes under, it can destroy a town.”
The city is now rolling out pilot programs to get food handler certificate training to people with low incomes, partly to provide workers for an industry that’s hungry for them.
The food sector is no panacea. It won’t replace the many jobs lost by the auto part industry. But it is replacing some of them.
“Personally I think the employment thing is so good,” says Gracie. “Because you know, not everybody in Toronto can be bankers.”
