GrainsWest Summer 2018

The Food Issue 2018 Grains West 36 FEATURE health technology at NAIT in Edmonton. After working as a veterinary technician in Yellowknife for a time, she returned to Strathmore where she and Kyle had dated as teenagers. The two reunited and married in 2012, both later taking managerial jobs at W.A. Grain & Pulse Solutions, a crop-marketing business headquartered in Innisfail. Here, they learned the ins and outs of the grain marketing industry. Coincidentally, it was through this job that Kyle met a malting equipment manufacturer from Fargo, North Dakota, sparking the idea to create a malting and brewing business. The company was able to custom build the gear needed to process malting barley on the small scale the Geeraerts required. Four years prior, the federal government had moved to dissolve the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly, thus allowing farmers to sell their own crops domestically and internationally as of August 1, 2012. Rather than dropping their product at the elevator and waiting for a cheque, farmers could now develop relationships with buyers. Taking immediate advantage of the opportunity, the Hiltons flew to Petaluma, California, cutting a deal that very day to sell barley directly to Lagunitas Brewing Company—then one of the biggest craft brewers in the United States and now owned by Heineken. In securing this deal, the Hiltons pioneered the forward- contracting of malting barley to large breweries, a cutting-edge practice at the time. The deal established Hilton Ventures as the first member of the Chinook Arch Growers, a collective of 15 Alberta and Saskatchewan farms supplying approximately 95 per cent of Lagunitas’ malt through Alberta’s Rahr Malting. “That deal gave us a real look into the ability to trace and follow our barley through the processes of malting and then brewing and eventually to the consumer level,” Spencer explained. This realization that brewers and their clientele crave high-quality barley and want to know where and how it is grown led Kyle and Meleah to pitch Origin as the family’s next business venture. “For consumers, that local trend— supporting local farms and local communities—was starting to mean everything,” Kyle said. “So, we went around asking brewers, if, within a half hour of Calgary they could get the same barley Lagunitas uses to brew over a million barrels per year, would they be interested. Not a single person said no.” The Hiltons saw a parallel between the desires of craft beer consumers and their own ambitions to grow high-quality barley sustainably and in an ecologically sound way. “Farmers were starting to see how much brewers and consumers really cared about the quality of these products,” Kyle said. An exercise in vertical integration, the goal in creating Origin was to capture more links in the value chain with their malting barley. They could sell the unprocessed crop but also malt it, brew it and sell their own beer, further controlling their product and profits. “Meleah and Kyle were very interested in getting involved back on our farm at this time,” Spencer said. “Building Origin gave them the opportunity to do it in a non-traditional way, unlike sitting on the tractor or chasing cows. We call it the new agriculture.” He added that while his family was discussing startup plans with Chris Chivilo, co-owner and CEO of W.A. Grain & Pulse Solutions and the Geeraerts’ former boss, he expressed Family history: Gordon and Viola Hilton take to the field with children Spencer and Carolyn (right). Years later, the Hilton Ventures harvest crew—including grown-up Spencer, Sterling and Dane—takes a break.