The durum Perry Robinson delivered to the elevator this fall fetched him $2.76 a bushel. The initial payment was barely enough to cover his inputs.
Instead of accepting that reality, the Yorkton, Sask., resident is trying to do something else with his crop. For the last four years he has been milling a small portion of his 250 acre crop, using the stone-ground durum to create pasta noodles and a unique snack chip product called Rinkles.
One day Robinson decided to chop up the lasagna noodles he was making and deep fry them. Now he has a machine (a converted meat grinder/mixer) that extrudes the durum chips for him. The chips are fried in canola oil, sprinkled with barbecue or California ranch seasoning and then cooled and packaged.
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Robinson said he has created a snack food that has a higher protein content and less fat than average potato chips.
In the beginning he sold the durum chips out of the bakery he ran in Yorkton. Sales were steady so he branched out to gas stations and convenience stores in the community. A drug store is his biggest buyer.
When he sold the chips out of his bakery he packaged them in a clear plastic bag with a red clip on the top. He had to upgrade the packaging when he moved into other retail outlets. He bought 30,000 shiny new 200 gram bags at a cost of 30 cents a bag.
“Packaging costs are unbelievable. It’s astronomical,” said Robinson.
This spring he sold the bakery, devoting his attention to producing durum chips, pasta and frozen poppy seed rolls that he sells to grocers with in-store bakeries. He sells about 300 bags of chips, 200 pounds of pasta and 320 poppy seed rolls a month. The chips sell for $1.99 to $2.09 in stores, the home-made pasta sells at $2.99 a pound and the poppy seed rolls fetch $4.29 a roll.
All of his sales are local, but Robinson plans on branching out. Recently he hired a marketing company to help him sell the product to Winnipeg grocery stores, but the revenues were negated by the marketing costs.
“I don’t think this Winnipeg exercise was a waste of time, but it didn’t pan out the way I thought,” said Robinson.
A cheque for $3,000 from Agriculture Canada’s Canadian Adaptation and Rural Development Fund in Saskatchewan will help ease that learning experience.
For his next foray into the city, Robinson has decided to handle the marketing duties himself. He has arranged to do some baking and sampling of his poppy seed rolls at a co-op store in Regina. He hopes it will lead to more Regina business for all his products.
Robinson is putting on the whole show himself, from growing the durum to marketing the end products. Now that harvest is done, he is devoting about 20 hours a week to this sideline. In the next six months he hopes to be producing 1,600 poppy seed rolls, 3,200 bags of chips and 1,000 pounds of pasta a month.
