Farm to Fork: Corn

We’ve made it easy to find out where your food comes from by breaking down the main steps involved in the farming supply chain. Below are the steps it takes to get harvested corn from Ontario fields turned to cornmeal for delicious recipes like cornmeal muffins!

Fork: Cornmeal raisin breakfast muffins

Step 6: Consumers, like you, purchase cornmeal from the grocery store, bring it home and make a delicious meal with it!

Step 5: The cornmeal is then sent from the food distributor to large retail grocery stores, where they are put on the shelves.

Step 4: At the mill, the product is then ground into meal via stone milling or hammer milling. After grinding, the corn meal is sifted to separate the corn meal particles. The resulting corn meal is the packaged and sent to a food distributor.

Step 3: At the food processing facility, the corn is cleaned, and the germ and endosperm of the kernel is removed. This product is then sent to a mill.

Step 2: The merchant or cooperative then sells the corn to a food processor and arranges shipping of the grain from the storage location to the food processing facility.

Step 1: Grain corn is sold by the farmer to a merchant, or cooperative at a set price that was made via a contract that was set up prior to harvest, and sometimes even before the crop is planted and is then stored either on farm in grain bins or at a grain elevator. Once the corn arrives at the elevator, it is checked to ensure that the grain meets certain quality standards.

Farm: Grain corn is harvested from Ontario fields in the fall (October- December) using a combine.