Next time you're shopping at a grocery store downstate, keep an eye out for a familiar Leelanau County brand. Starting this month, The Mill Glen Arbor is taking one of its popular product lines statewide – and beyond.

Earlier this fall, The Mill announced that its organic sourdough crackers had “begun to hit retail shelves across Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana,” thanks to a new partnership with food distributor Carmela Foods. The move marks a significant expansion for The Mill, which opened its café in spring 2023 and has since evolved to include lodging, a supper club, and more. The Leelanau Ticker sat down with Tyler Smith-TerHaar, The Mill’s sales director, to find out how this small northern Michigan business is morphing to meet the needs of its growing footprint.

The Mill Glen Arbor opened in April 2023, after a lengthy gestation stage that saw significant restoration on the historic gristmill building and a ballot referendum from locals who fretted about it bringing an overly commercial atmosphere to an otherwise residential part of Glen Arbor. Since then, The Mill and the hospitality group behind it, Fernhaus, has grown its influence to include Millie’s, a pizza place in Glen Arbor; and Outpost, a bakery and coffee shop in downtown Traverse City. Both of those ventures bake with flour milled at The Mill.

The Mill’s crackers are billed as an “extension” of the business’s sourdough bread, using many of the same ingredients but a different baking process. The crackers get a 24-hour ferment and are then baked “in small batches on large sheets.” Rather than being broken into standard cracker sizes, the crackers are “left mostly whole,” with an almost flatbread-like appearance.

Until recently, Smith-TerHaar says, The Mill was baking its cracker batches out of the small kitchen at Millie’s. Crackers were then packaged up and sold at The Mill café, as well as through local grocery stores. Back in May, though, The Mill got a new commercial kitchen space at the Long Lake Culinary Campus in Traverse City, paving the way for a significant expansion.

Smith-TerHaar says the bakers at the new kitchen are prepping “crackers by the pallet,” with distribution now up from a handful of local retail accounts to some 70 stores across Carmela’s tri-state territory.

“It’s been a bit of a juggle,” Smith-TerHaar tells The Ticker. “Part of the evolution of this cracker program has been an organic certification process and a non-GMO certification process, and we’ve worked through all these different channels to make sure that we could label ourselves as 100 percent organic and non-GMO. That was definitely a big hurdle, and that was before we even announced the Carmela partnership.”

With Mill crackers now popping up in stores statewide, is The Mill considering an even deeper dive into the food distribution game?

“The next big product that we would launch is our freshly-milled flours,” Smith-TerHaar says. “We are an operating mill, and so that is still very much a part of our ethos and a big part of our company. We’ve sold our flours in the past, and we would like to get back into that on a larger scale. So, that would definitely be the next big next phase of our distribution plan. I don't necessarily have a timeline for that, but next holiday season is a possibility.”

Also potentially on the to-do list is further diversification of the cracker line. The Mill makes four flavors: sea salt, everything, spicy pizza, and za’atar. Smith-TerHaar says The Mill is considering everything from additional flavors to a smaller cracker size, though he admits those are probably “on the backburner” until The Mill gets its sea legs with the new distribution deal.

“We have been really focused on just producing enough crackers to get these orders filled – and on doing it to the high standard of quality our customers have gotten used to,” he says. “That said, more versions of this product are definitely an option for the future.”