Emma Zimmerman is cultivating an old-fashioned family business – albeit one with Whole Foods distribution and a James Beard Award-nominated cookbook.
By Leah LeMoine | Photography by Jim David
Most businesses start with a five-year plan. Emma Zimmerman’s blueprint for Hayden Flour Mills – the heritage grain company she and her father, Jeff Zimmerman, started in 2012 – is a bit more far-reaching: a century.
“I remember hearing the Patagonia founder [Yvon Chouinard] say, ‘I have a 100-year plan,’” she says. “I want my business to be around in 100 years, which is kind of countercultural to start-ups these days, where it’s just like a flash in the pan, a unicorn – just get many users and sell it.” Zimmerman has intentionally done the opposite in her quest to resuscitate heirloom grains in danger of extinction. “Let’s be slow and steady. We’re trying to change farming and how we eat.”
In 2011, Zimmerman found herself back home in the Valley after leaving her doctoral program in neuroethics at McGill University. “It was really fun to live in Montréal. The Ph.D., not so great,” she laughs. When her dad started dreaming up a revival of Tempe’s old Hayden Flour Mill, which supplied Arizonans with flour from local grains from 1874 to 1998, she was ready to explore something “grounded” after her more “philosophical” coursework.
“We started growing 10 acres of White Sonora wheat here on Sossaman Farms,” Zimmerman says during a tour of the Queen Creek mill. “We’d go to the market with our little coffee bags of flour and sell nothing… A good weekend would have been like $500 [in sales].”
They slowly built their clientele – well-known Valley chefs like Chris Bianco and Charleen Badman, Tucson’s Don Guerra and local-product-loving home cooks. Twelve years later, “we’re about up to 400 acres total of all our crops” at partner farms in Arizona, and their flours and pastas are in Whole Foods nationwide. “We get a P.O. for $34,000 of product, and we have to build huge pallets instead of little bags of chickpea flour.”
In 2016, they went from scrappy local business to nationwide success story when they won a Martha Stewart Living American Made Award. National press (Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Marie Claire) and specialty food stores started calling. “With the premium product, the coasts are just where the money is,” Zimmerman says of their expanded distribution. Hayden’s beautiful packaging – more at home in a boutique display than on a grocery store shelf – also sets it apart from competitors.
“When you look at all the other places like Barton Springs Mill, Camas Country Mill [and] Cairnsprings Mill, they’re all kind of doing what we do in different geographies,” Jeff Zimmerman says. “[Their branding is] very masculine. And you look at what we have, and it’s very feminine, or very soft, very beautiful. It’s brought us a different customer… They can sense the art to it… The company really is an expression of Emma’s creativity.”
As is her 2022 cookbook, The Miller’s Daughter, for which she was nominated for a James Beard Award. Zimmerman wrote it at the height of quarantine in 2020, while pregnant with her third child. “I gave birth to Max and turned in my manuscript, and it was so crazy,” she says. “There was a lot of holding the baby and typing.”
She’s hard at work on her next cookbook and building the foundation for the next evolution of the family business: a co-op-style space for other local food companies at its Tempe headquarters. The first “tenants” are Tucson’s Barrio Bread and Phoenix’s Sonoran Pasta Co., which have set up kitchen operations there and utilize Hayden grains. Both have pop-ups that draw lines that snake through the parking lot.
“Our dream would be to be like a Zingerman’s,” Zimmerman says of the famed Ann Arbor, Michigan, hub of related food companies. “They’re such an inspiring business because they are such a part of their community, which I really love, and they’re selling this very local flavor and have this family of businesses.” She doesn’t care if the companies under the Hayden roof are “hers” or not. “Maybe we don’t grow ourselves huge, but we get to empower the sort of local foods 2.0.”
With the Grain
Chef accounts make up 50 percent of Hayden Flour Mills’ business, says owner Emma Zimmerman. “For chefs, we have so many products. We have special blends,” she says. We asked for her favorite local spots to eat dishes that use her grains.
- Trevor’s Pizza
“My dad will pick up a pizza when he delivers [flour]” to the Mayo Boulevard outpost of Trevor’s Liquor and its pizzeria. “They make a really nice pizza.”
- Myke’s Pizza
“Myke’s Pizza is so good with our flour,” she says of the hot spot, which operates out of Cider Corps in downtown Mesa.
- Tratto
Chris Bianco was an early Hayden supporter, and the mill once worked out of Marco Bianco’s bakery. “I mean, handmade pasta is so good,” Zimmerman says.
