GAME AND SET: It was 1987 when Mark and Tina Hills founded Hills Food Ltd.
— www.hillsfoods.com — on the basis of an aging rabbit abattoir they’d acquired in Mission. Something of a game stampede followed as they added pheasant, wild boar, venison, buffalo, muskox, caribou, alligator and, recently, kangaroo to the meats a staff of 28 now handles in the firm’s 9,000-square-foot Coquitlam facility. That development is likely not what Victoria-raised Mark Hills originally expected. A trained chef (he once cooked aboard Canadian Hydrographic Service ships), he learned the wholesale-food trade by selling mozarella cheese to pizza joints, became B.C. sales supervisor for Vancouver-based Ocean Food Sales and eventually opened his own Seashore Fish store in Victoria. Realizing that his heart — and potential fortune — weren’t in shopkeeping, he offered to buy Albion Fisheries Victoria operation. Instead, Albion bought him out, hired him as general manager, and reportedly watched him triple sales revenue. Transferring to Vancouver as sales and marketing manager, Hills promptly took queries from Expo 86’s European exhibitors wanting game to serve game birds and meats in their national pavilions. “It just clicked in my head: Here’s my opportunity,” Hills recalls. It took six years for the rabbit abattoir to prove “not such a good deal,” so the Hills contracted it out and concentrated on their now-core enterprise. After leasing progressively larger plants, they paid $600,000 and $200,000 for equipment in 2001 for two 3,000-square-foot units they occupy today. They added a third unit to handle their growing trade in free-range eggs from Manitoba. Further growth is feasible by increasing value-added sales from 30 to 50 per cent. A second option would be to change from provincial to federal regulation, which would likely need new investment of $1.5 million and likely put yearly sales in the eight-figure range. “Doors would open up, but I don’t want to go into debt,” which is currently “minimal,” Mark Hills says. Specialty sausages — including duck hot-smoked kielbasa style — are obvious value-added leaders. So is the muskox prosciutto called mipkuzola, of which Hills expects to sell 4,000 pounds (at $40 wholesale) and promotes as part of “a classic Canadian eggs Benedict.” Then, echoing how Expo 86 hit his entrepreneurial switch, “If mipkuzola isn’t on every table during the 2010 Olympics, I’ll be very sad.” – – – REKERT’S RECORD: Picture yourself in the special-events-management game. Your phone stopped ringing when the economy started plunging, right Not so, said Pat Rekert, the In Any Event Design firm owner who’s so busy she almost broke her rule about taking on more work than she can comfortably handle.
“Four in a month! I never do that many of that magnitude,” said one-time professional photographer Rekert, who turned down two more in the process. However, “Bigger events are easier, because you have more crew.”