The iron-ore business is so lousy that one Canadian mining company is shelving its biggest project and starting a new venture: selling Australian eggs to China.

The abrupt shift at Century Iron Mines Corp. was prompted by a global iron-ore surplus that sent prices plunging 68 per cent in four years.

Chief Executive Officer Sandy Chim doesn’t expect a recovery until 2018, so he’s taken a cue from Australian mining billionaires Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest, who are expanding into food production as demand rises across Asia.

“Australia is going from mining to dining,” Chim said by telephone from Toronto, where the company created a unit called Century Food. The plan is to distribute eggs produced by Sunny Queen Pty., a chicken-farmer cooperative in Queensland, to consumers in Hong Kong and Macau.

With the backing of Wuhan Iron & Steel Corp. and China Minmetals Corp., the government-owned companies that own 30 per cent of Century Iron Mines, Chim is investing $2 million in the egg venture. He’s drawing on capital originally intended for Century’s flagship Joyce Lake mine project straddling the Canadian provinces of Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

As recently as November, after tests indicated 24.3 million metric tons of reserves, Century was expecting to spend $250 million on development and start production in 2017. But iron ore went from bad to worse as producers like Rio Tinto Group, Vale SA and BHP Billiton Ltd. expanded output from lower-cost mines. At the same time, demand slowed from steelmakers in China, who use about 70 percent of output.