BC Buy Local and Kaslo Sourdough Suppliers.
We love being part of "buy local". As a small family business, the communities that we are a part of are very important to us. And the buy local community is one of them. Last month we put together a business profile about our company for LocoBC. We know them as an organization that promotes buying BC local products through their gift card platform, Support Local BC. LocoBC has three main areas of work:
- Research to measure the impact of buy local campaigns, promote local economic development in communities in BC, identify research trends and recommend policy changes
- Education by engaging businesses, consumers and organizations to make them aware of the benefits o independent businesses.
- Engagement by hosting events that connect local businesses and promote buy local goals.
So doing the profile for them and answering their questions made us think about how our business circulates dollars in our community, and the communities that we support. And we thought we'd share some of that with you.
This is the first of a small series of blog posts that share who else you are supporting when you support our business. This first blog post will cover some of our suppliers.
The buy local lens can include our region (the Kootenays), our province (BC), or our country (Canada). We'll walk through these three aspects of buy local for Kaslo Sourdough.
Kaslo Sourdough Suppliers
Kaslo Sourdough is a value-add company. We take raw ingredients (flour, water, bacterial culture) and turn them into a product like none other: sourdough pasta.
Some of the grains and seeds we buy are ground into flour already, and some of it we ground ourselves. When we grinding our own flour, we do so with our stoneground flour mill, where two large stones grind the seeds, retaining all the nutritional goodness of the whole seed.
We use a variety of grains and seeds in our products: wheat and whole wheat, quinoa, hemp, and many others. Likewise, our suppliers vary. But here is the short list of where we get our different flours, seeds and grains from:
- Nunweiler's Flour Company - a company founded in Western Canada in 1910! We love their approach to keeping the whole grain in their flours, and fresh, organic, minimally processed foods. All the farmers they source their wheat from grow their grains on the Canadian Prairies. They are also a family-owned business.
- Rogers Foods - A BC-based flour milling company with mills in both Chilliwack and Armstrong, BC. They've been in the business of milling for over 60 years!
- Anita's Organic Mill - Another organic flour mill in Chilliwack BC. Anita's also supplies some of our organic flours. We appreciate their dedication to finding recyclable packaging for their flour bags, reducing environmental waste.
- Hemp Production Services - our hemp flour supplier! We were super excited to find and support this Canadian hemp company to source our hemp flour.
- And last but not least: a Creston-local farmer who grows amazing heritage grain wheat that we are privileged to use!
As you may know, we keep and care for to our sourdough in-house, and we also get our water from a natural spring near our pasta production facility. We rely on our suppliers to get us the high quality grains, seeds and flours we need to make our sourdough breads and pastas.
We have some amazing flour millers and grain growers here in Canada, and you're supporting the five listed above when you support us. For us, local isn't just a place - it's a community and a set of shared values. Thank you for sharing in ours.
In the next blog post, we'll cover some of the businesses we support right in town with some of our dollars, before we round out a third and final post about transportation and the shipping companies we rely on to get our products to you.
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