
Thousand-year-old mill has resumed production due to demand for flour - rmason
https://www.foodandwine.com/news/1000-year-old-mill-reopens-flour-demand
======
rmason
This crisis has had an energizing effect not only on thousand year old mills
but startups as well.

So there's a Michigan startup that makes... bamboo toilet paper. I don't know
what kind of demand there is for bamboo toilet paper. A week after toilet
paper became unavailable at any price they got a story written about them.
They were having a warehouse sale where you could pick it up at the plant.

[https://heybippy.com/](https://heybippy.com/)

The next day the paper had a picture of a woman in a brand new Mercedes full
to the brim. She couldn't see out of the back window, the passenger seat was
full and she had some on her lap! Now apparently they're selling it as fast as
they can make it as long as their bamboo supply holds.

I know someone whom I believe is an investor and I will check in with them
later this summer. I am curious once the shortage is over and the supermarkets
are stacked to the ceiling with Charmin will they still have a business?

Will people develop a fondness for bamboo toilet paper? If they do that
founder will have the pandemic to thank.

~~~
trhway
TP is a bit unexpected. The local store got bamboo paper towels which
supposedly can be washed and reused multiple times. That advantage would still
be there even after pandemic. Probably they can always pivot from TP to
towels.

Wrt. the original article - cool, the [cold] stone grounded flour is better
then the industrial fast (and importantly - hot) crush which thus affects the
floor's carbohydrates state (and resulting yeast action, etc.).

~~~
renewiltord
You're supposed to wipe your butt with these and then wash the dirty cloth?
Why on Earth would I do that? Am I supposed to be saving money with this or
something?

~~~
fiblye
Paper towels aren’t for your butt. They’re for wiping up things in the
kitchen, your floor, dust, etc.

~~~
renewiltord
Oh paper towels! Not toilet paper. Oops, my mistake! I guess I had that on my
mind. Yeah, I've actually owned some of those wash and use paper towels.
They're pretty decent.

~~~
arcticbull
Mistake... or new startup idea! Re-usable bamboo toilet paper.

------
verytrivial
Tangential: The mill a mile up the road from my house was was listed in the
Doomsday Book in 1089AD (though has likely burnt down a few times.) And when
"attached" the local cathedral it produced the original hot crossed buns. It
was printed in a visitor centre leaflet so it must be true.

~~~
myself248
Domesday _

~~~
verytrivial
.. yeah. Thanks autocorrect/HN edit lockout. Grumble.

------
gorgoiler
I had no idea about the businesses that are part of this word until we had to
start hunting for bread flour and ended up finding:

1/ our city has an industrial wheat varietal breeder that makes a novel new
brand based on Paragon,

2/ it also happens to be grown on an organic farm just west of us,

3/ and is milled and distributed by a nationwide famous windmill about 20
minutes to the north east.

It’s a whole little world of actually quite new tech in the area I had no idea
existed, with this weird overlap with technology hundreds and thousands of
years old.

~~~
dv_dt
I wish there were a commerce directory that would enable search and discovery
for local businesses like this.

~~~
frandroid
Something printed on yellow paper, maybe!

~~~
dv_dt
You jest, the yellow pages online are a travesty of interface woes, but I
guess I was able to enter flour and a number of companies did come up.

But I think they are missing out on listings for products, resource, or
manufacturing inputs & waste connecting angle that would be really
interesting. The best thing they have is maybe industry category keywords.

~~~
rhizome
The entire business model of the Yellow Pages is to sell entries to
businesses, and any value you get out of that is (at least) secondary. It's
basically a gym subscription model, except its hosting costs and transit that
eat into their profits. Just like the most profitable way to run a gym is to
sell subscriptions to people who never visit.

~~~
dv_dt
Not sure that's quite the right model. Everyone can pile into looking up
entries in the yellow pages online, and the more people find businesses, the
more value the yp has in it's base product vs the costs of buying an entry.

The more people pile into a gym there becomes a point of declining value
because you can't get on a machine and the room gets stuffier, conditions
worsen.

I think not finding other value enhancing propositions for the yellow pages is
mostly about brand stagnation.

~~~
rhizome
> _the more people find businesses, the more value the yp has in it 's base
> product vs the costs of buying an entry._

I'm not sure this is true. Zero marginal cost for usage does not create an
opportunity for profit. How could it? Selling ads for your pages filled with
ads?

------
devmunchies
So much flour will sit in people’s pantry and go bad, never opened.

~~~
remmargorp64
I personally bought 200 lbs of flour from a mill (they only sold 50 lb bags,
and I needed a couple of different types of flour to do the different baking
projects I wanted to do).

Each bag was around $30. With shipping and handling, the grand total came to
around $200 total.

I've already made 6 pizzas, 8 loaves of sourdough bread, 3 cakes, and 4
batches of cookies. I've been baking about two new loaves of sourdough every
week.

When you consider that a single pizza order for delivery typically costs
around $30 after tip and your typical artisanal bread loaf at the store is
around $5, my flour has already paid for itself, and I still have months of
flour left (assuming I keep baking 2 loaves every week).

I would agree with you, though. Many people probably aren't actually using
their flour and baking goods they have been hoarding (beyond making a couple
of things).

For me, though, baking has essentially turned into my hobby.

$200 to fund an entire hobby that will keep me entertained (and and my little
family fed) for months? Not the worst $200 I have spent, that's for sure.

~~~
zeristor
I’ve been going deep on sour dough, like so many others.

A key thing people don’t seem to mention is having an oven that can get up to
a high temperature 260° C seems to be the goal.

180°C seems to be as high as the oven I inherited in my flat will go.

~~~
lostlogin
You may already do it, but you can help by putting the bread in a pre-heated
iron pot. This seems to help stabilize the temperature (and it helps top the
top burning too).

------
sriram_sun
Buy a mill folks! The one I bought for 10 years back cost me about $350.
Steep, yes. Considering all that freshly ground flour in the proportions that
I wanted, it was a no-brainer in hindsight. I cannot for the life of me find
reasonably priced wheat kernels at this time. So paradoxically for the past 2
months it has been sitting idle!

~~~
bovermyer
When I first read this, I somehow thought you meant an actual building, and
not the in-home type. Must be the whole Friday evening thing.

~~~
jagannathtech
You are not alone

~~~
sriram_sun
Ha ha ha! Sorry for the confusion. My mind kept saying "don't endorse a
particular brand". So I was "carefully" optimizing my response for that!

------
aazaa
Those talking about the economics appear to live in areas with abundant flour.

In many places in the US at least, it's very difficult to find any. It has
been this way for weeks. Supermarkets get it and it flies off the shelves.

~~~
morley
It seems so bizarre that so much flour is being consumed now. Are people
hoarding it, or would this demand otherwise have been met from restaurants?

~~~
crazygringo
Baking at home has skyrocketed. When you're bored it's an easy, family-
friendly rewarding way to spend a couple hours.

Think about how often people bake normally. Not often. Now it's all the time.

Same reason why eggs and vanilla are also harder to find in some places.

~~~
ghaff
Eggs seem to be pretty much back in stock where I live though they were scarce
for a while. With eggs, it may not be baking so much (and you mostly don't
even use them with yeast bread). But you've got whole families at home and I
imagine there are a lot more hot breakfasts going on which can chew up egg
stocks pretty quickly.

~~~
jschwartzi
This was true for us. I live with my fiance and we started cooking an omlette
to be split between us every morning since this started. At three eggs a
morning we can go through a dozen every 4 days. At one point we were trying to
skip a trip to the store so I made a batch of black beans that we were eating
for breakfast with tortillas and fresh cilantro.

Store pickup also complicated things as you usually only get about 60 to 70
percent of the items you ask for, and usually it's the sundries that get
knocked out. So you can ask for all the ingredients for a complete meal plan
and wind up with all the vegetables and a little meat but nothing else. Or you
get shorted on other aspects of the pickup(this is just a bare statement of
fact). We gave up and just went into the store with homemade PPE.

I do think this situation is revealing just how fragile our system of just-in-
time delivery and globalization is. For things like N95 masks national borders
are very real, and being dependent on China for everything in the US is really
really bad.

It's also highlighting for me how important it is to know how to cook and be
fluent in different kinds of cooking besides the standard American diet. When
this first started the store shelves were picked clean of anything that most
people recognize as nonperishable food. So I grabbed things like textured
vegetable protein and millet. The shortages are really only a problem if you
don't cook from first principles or don't have much experience with spices or
other sources of flavor.

~~~
ghaff
>Store pickup also complicated things as you usually only get about 60 to 70
percent of the items you ask for, and usually it's the sundries that get
knocked out.

Making a grocery store run about once a week (earlyish AM on a weekday) is one
of the few compromises I've been making to just staying on my own property or
adjacent basically unused forest trails. And the reason is as you say. I find
a lot of real-time adjustments are still needed depending upon what's in
stock.

------
zabil
I live in London, it's been four weeks since I last saw a pack of flour on the
store shelf. The demand is that high.

~~~
lb1lf
-Do you have yeast? Over on the other side of the North Sea, we've got more flour than we know what to do with on the shelves, as there is no yeast to be had - haven't seen a yeast cube in a month! (good thing sourdough is a thing!)

~~~
zabil
Yes! I managed to find a block of yeast last week. But, I can't use it as I
got no flour :(

~~~
benibela
In Germany, I have flour, but no yeast

I made a sourdough starter. It is kind of working, but some parts are tasting
odd. There was also mold buildup at the margin

~~~
cyphar
You need to make sure that the culture is stable before you use it -- it
should smell sour, but with no other foul smells. In the first week of a new
starter, you shouldn't use it because the bacterial cultures are still
fighting for dominance.

As for mould build-up, that isn't a good sign. It does happen and I know
people who just scrape off the mould and move on with their lives but I'd
personally start again from scratch.

~~~
benibela
It got better

The real problem is that I keep it in the fridge too long, when I do not need
it

------
jvm_
We've moved into a real-world board game. This tile over here has wheat, if
you go get it and then move to this tile, you can process it and gain bread -
but your bread resource declines by 1 loaf per day.

------
Jerry2
Anecdotal: In the city where I live, my family hasn't been able to buy flour
for the past 4 weeks. It's always out of stock. I hear from clerks that they
get it occasionally but it sells out in under an hour. My closest grocery
store also allots the first hour after they open to seniors and others who are
vulnerable and most of the time, the flour is gone during this hour.

Since we export so much grain every year, I'm amazed that there's such a
massive shortage of flour. I don't know if it's the shortage of grains or
mills.

~~~
lostlogin
Where I am (New Zealand) there is no shortage of flour, but a shortage of
packaging. The vast bulk of flour was previously sold to bakers and other
buyers in bulk - 25kg sacks. Now demand is for 1-5kg bags. The flour is here,
but it's in the wrong bags and the suppliers have no staff or materials.
[https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12321873)

------
onetimemanytime
In a lot of countries villagers plant their own wheat, mill it and bake bread
for the entire year. Others buy 50-80lbs bags of wheat. Wheat is great for
hard times, it fills your stomach and relatively cheap. It's a peace of mind
as well, no matter what happens we have something

------
flatline
Opening this page pegged one processor in firefox :/

~~~
tomxor
Something very daft going on inside a requestAnimationFrame loop causing lots
of css style re-computation with no discernible affect, pretty sad.

------
oh_sigh
I can't really understand how this is economical. After 10 days, they produced
200 3-lbs bags of flour. I don't know what they sell for but I can get flour
in a supermarket for 30c/lbs so maybe 60c/lbs since its artisanal? So that's
$360 out the door, but how much did you pay for the wheat itself, to the
grocer(if not direct to consumer), and for operating the mill?

~~~
hinkley
From what I understand, in at least some areas of the world the mill was a
service model, not a manufacturing model.

You'd bring your grain in, they would mill it, and keep a fraction of the
product as a fee. Sure, they're still selling flour for goods and services,
but it's a fraction of the volume versus buying grain and selling flour.

The overhead is tiny, but the distribution area is, too.

~~~
Gibbon1
What I understand is that's how it worked everywhere. Lots of small mills that
took a cut as payment.

Friend of mine mentioned a while back one of his 12 year old nieces in India
getting bread. Started with measuring out a wheat into a bucket. Then going
down the street to a place that ground it into flour. Then to a place that
turned that into dough. A place next door that beat it into shape. Finally to
the baker. Each place took a bit as payment.

This isn't like way back when, it was a couple of years ago.

BTW: There is a working gristmill in St Helena, closed till further notice of
course. I think they run it a couple of times a year.

[https://napaoutdoors.org/parks/bale-grist-mill-state-
histori...](https://napaoutdoors.org/parks/bale-grist-mill-state-historic-
park/)

------
Bang2Bay
people who are used to eating out have now bought a lot of grains and flour.

------
TLightful
Funny, as there is no shortage of bread on the supermarket shelves.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I think I read that only 4% of flour ends up in the shelves in normal times.
Most of it goes direct to bakeries.

------
londons_explore
In 10 days of operation, they have 200 3lb bags of flour.

Each would be worth $1.50 in walmart, and due to anti price-gouging laws, it
would be illegal to charge more than that.

So after 10 days operating, with presumably at least a few people on-site,
they have produced goods which can sell for $300, or a revenue of $30 per day.

I think this is more a publicity excercise than a commercial operation...

~~~
happytoexplain
Holy crap - what information do you have about these people that makes you
think they are engaging in a publicity exercise, rather than simply _trying to
help_?

~~~
floatrock
> millers Pete Loosmore and Imogen Bittner decided that, due to the current
> demand for flour and the loss of income from visitors, this would be a good
> time to re-embrace the mill's commercial production capabilities.

I mean, I wouldn't call it a publicity exercise, but they quite explicitly say
they need to make up for lost tourism income. Call it an operational pivot.

The lesson here is it's good to have a diversity of offerings. Some of their
budget probably comes from historic site funds and maybe they also offer
weddings or events, but the point is there certainly is a commercial interest
in this.

------
happytoexplain
Suggested title:

Thousand-Year-Old Mill Producing Flour for First Time in 50 Years Due to
Demand

~~~
schnevets
How about:

Thousand-Year-Old Mill Producing Flour for First Time in 50 Years Due to
Inability for Supply Chains to Divert Product from Shut-Down Commercial Buyers
to Personal Customers

~~~
epicureanideal
Does anyone know why it is such a problem for our supply chain to shift from
commercial buyers to consumers?

I imagine there are people out there willing to buy in commercial sizes, if
packaging is the problem...

~~~
peterwwillis
The short answer is "because logistics".

~~~
schnevets
This is the best response. I like highlighting that this is a logistics
problem, because humanity has become more adept at solving logistics issues
since the start of the 21st century.

I feel like people are becoming increasingly fatalistic about challenges like
overpopulation while we have tools to help fix these problems that didn't
exist 20 years ago. Yes, the world is changing at a speed that makes people
uneasy, but the world that emerges out of this could be more resilient, better
fed, and more environmentally sound as long as we continue to solve problems.

~~~
epicureanideal
Can you share some of the advances in logistics since 2000?

We've had shipping containers for a few decades before that, trucks and
pipelines and so on.

What's new?

~~~
peterwwillis
Basically, digital technology. We now have access to so much raw data, with
such immediacy, and the capability to process it, that we can identify and
work around problems and find more efficient solutions faster and better than
ever. The main way this shows up in society is probably the maximization of
profits that leads to increased wealth/prosperity. That doesn't describe _who_
is getting that wealth of course :), but it's there. So we have a better
_opportunity and capability_ to solve problems than ever before. The trick is
getting society to adopt it properly.

WRT the logistics of scaling a supply chain, we have the capability to
identify supply chain inefficiencies and provide fixes. As a store sells out
of toilet paper, it's possible for the store's database to be linked up to the
toiler paper distribution company, so they know when a shortage is happening
in real time. But how long does it take the manufacturer they buy from to spin
up more TP? Too long. To fill the gap immediately, the store would need to
detect that the original distributor won't be able to fulfill the projected
increased capacity, and start filling orders with some other distributor
somewhere else in the world to get more TP. But we also may be assuming that
the whole world isn't having a shortage... if it is, is there enough cargo
plane capacity to ship from these remote places? If not, more logistics is
needed.

The capability to automatically perform that logistical ninjutsu at each stage
of the supply chain is now easier than ever. But nobody ever programmed their
systems (much less signed the right business agreements) to actually do it,
because nobody really needed TP to "scale". And this is the actually hard
logistics problem: it's not enough to have the _capability_ to do something,
you have to actually implement it in your system. They haven't done that, so
the supply chain doesn't automatically scale.

But all of that ignores the impact of a global trade network on logistics.
Assume you did this for coffee, and a shortage of beans (or price increase)
from one country led you to automatically buy from another country with
cheaper/more plentiful beans. The impact would be to automatically penalize
one country's farmers for trade embargoes, drought, war, or some other issue.
So while logistics are a very useful tool, they should be balanced against
their potential side-effects if we really want to maximize their benefit on a
global scale.

