Ancient & Heirloom Whole Grains

Time was, grains were grown to feed people. Farmers grew what tasted best and what was best for their communities.

The railroad changed everything. 

Food became a commodity. Shelf life and price governed everything.

This is when grains really got off track. 

 They became more and more heavily engineered for yield & profitability - not for flavor, not for your health. The end result was chemical-fertilizer dependent monocropping.

It's a practice that is eroding the precious biodiversity of our food system, depleting the health of our soil, and making our food taste worse.

Heirloom & Ancient Grains are not like this. They are what has been handed down to us faithfully, generation after generation, by farmers, not industries. 

They are much more flavorful than their modern counterparts, have gentler gluten structures, and are much more nutritionally dense. 

By definition, heirloom grains are also Non-GMO, whether they are certified so or not. This subject is far more complex than the question: Are GMO foods safe to eat? GMO foods are bad for biodiversity, bad for social & economic justice, bad for the soil, bad for the resilience of our regional foodsheds, bad for long-term pest management, bad for local ecologies, and really bad for family farms. Read more at Farm Aid.

Stone Ground

Stone-milling is a simple, ancient process: cleaned whole grain kernels go into a hand-dressed set of stones, and are ground into flour. All of what goes in comes out. 

It's how we have eaten grains for most of human history. It delivers everything good that a grain has to offer.

By contrast, the modern ‘roller mill’ splits the grain before milling it. Most of what is good for you (the endosperm & the bran) is removed. Some of it is replaced by chemically replicated imitations (this is what “enriched flour” means - even when it’s labeled “whole grain”), but it's a poor imitation of the real thing. 

It’s all so that the flour can sit on a shelf for two or three years before you buy it. They remove what makes it nutritious, in order to make it shelf stable.

The result is a nutritionally inferior dead food that does not attract pests - because most living things avoid it. 

Stone ground grains are different. They are rich with subtle flavors, densely packed with macro and micronutrients, and yes - their shelf life is shorter: only about a year from when they are milled into flour. 

That seems long enough to us. 

Small Batch

Grain, like fruit, like vegetables, is seasonal. Each harvest has slightly different characteristics than the one before it. Blue Corn grown on one farm has a subtly different taste than that grown on another farm. We celebrate that.

By contrast, most modern grains are grown for uniformity, combined in large batches to eliminate any unique characteristic in the name of consistency.

We also don’t want farmers all growing the same eight crops, each one the genetically engineered intellectual property of an enormous corporate entity. That’s how you end up eating a product, not a food.

The world can be richer and tastier than that. And it’s small farmers who are leading the way. Read more about our small-farm sourcing.

Nothing Artificial

We're proud of every one of our ingredients, and we hope you take the time to read the labels. Others are in the business of adding flavorings & filler to make their pancakes fluffy or flavorful. We are not. 

High Protein

11g of protein per serving when prepared as directed. The pancake mix alone (without egg, milk, or a fat) has 5g - as much as an egg. 

Moreover, they have a 1:3 protein to complex carbohydrate ratio. If you don't count macros, don't worry: it's good for you. 

If you do, you may recognize that ratio: it's what' preferred by endurance athletes for strength-building, long-lasting energy. 

We do all this without relying on industrial shortcuts like highly-processed protein powder. It's whole grains and nuts. 

Low Sugar

Only 4g per serving. 

Plant Based, Vegan

The benefits of a plant-based diet, both for you and for the earth - are well known and well documented.

The benefits to you include lower blood pressure, better heart health, weight control, potentially longer life, decreased risk of cancer, improved cholesterol, less risk of stroke & improved brain health.

The benefits to the planet include decreased carbon emissions, more efficient transformation of land to nutrition (decreasing the need to clearcut forests) & decreased water use.

From UCLA: "Pound-for-pound, gallon-for-gallon, animal-sourced foods use vastly more water and carbon to produce than plant-based foods.  However; ounce-for-ounce, the amount of protein that you get from plant-sources, such as legumes, seeds, and grains, is closely on par, plus full of other healthful nutrients including fiber, sterols, stanols, and vitamins and minerals.

...

1 pound of beef = 90-100 grams protein
(Costs 20 – 80 gallons of water per gram protein)

1 pound of oats = 75 grams of protein
(Costs 3.8 gallons of water per gram protein.)"

High Fiber

Fiber is amazing. 

It's one big reason why our cakes won't ever give you the dreaded 'pancake coma' rollercoaster that many pancakes do - you know, where you are very full, and then very sleepy, and then very hungry again? 

Fiber keeps you fuller longer, so you don't feel cravings to fill up on empty calories. It provides long-lasting energy, so you don't flag before lunch. 

It's also got all the classic hallmarks of healthy food: it helps control weight, cuts the risk of type 2 diabetes, maintains good heart health, improves gut bacterial health, and is associated with longer life. 

Regenerative Agriculture

We work with farms that farm regeneratively.

It would be hard to overstate the importance and promise of regenerative agriculture.

A global move toward regenerative agriculture has the potential to stop global warming in its tracks. 

This is because regenerative agriculture pulls carbon out of the atmosphere - where it is warming our planet at catastrophic rates - and puts it into the soil - where it contributes to more nutritious food, and reduced need for chemical fertilizer. 

Regenerative agriculture also promotes biodiversity - including the preservation of critical pollinator species such as bees, as well as soil organisms and microorganisms critical to filtering the 

By reducing farming costs, it offers farmers more reliable yields and a net increase in profits.

It rebuilds soil structure, vastly improving the ability of farmland to absorb and retain water, making crops less vulnerable to droughts and floods, both are which are predicted to grow in frequency under most global warming scenarios.

The complex soil microbiome it promotes suppress pests and plant diseases, reduces chemical leaching, and improves water filtration and downstream water quality.

Oh yeah, and it also produces food that is healthier and more nutrient dense.

Direct Trade with Farmers

Whenever possible, we source directly from the farm. 

This allows us to pass more of your dollars on to the family farmers in the upper midwest who are leading the way in regenerative farming - not to middlemen whose only motive is profit. 

Local Sourcing

If it grows locally, we get it locally. 

This helps in three big ways:

It reduces the carbon footprint of our freight. 

It ensures that we can have personal relationships with our suppliers, helping us to ensure an uncompromisingly high standard of quality. 

It makes sure that we are reinvesting money in our local grainshed economy, supporting regional economic stability and increasing the economic viability of growing healthy food regeneratively.

All of this flies in the face of the short-sighted powers that run the industrial supply-chains on a profit-only basis. 

But boy howdy does it make a good pancake. 

And it's the right thing to do for our great-great grandchildren. 

Member, AGC

We are proud members of the Artisan Grain Collaborative, a network of farmers, millers, maltsters, bakers, chefs, brewers, distillers, researchers, manufacturers, allies and advocates working together for a regenerative upper midwest grainshed.