41 Grains got started in 2019, as we were working through setting up the store and gym, the idea of creating a grain company came to me. A friend of ours was experimenting with some different kinds of flour, one of which was chickpea flour. The cookies he had made with chickpea flour were so good I couldn’t believe they weren’t made with regular flour, and knowing that chickpeas are naturally gluten free intrigued me.
So, as the store was getting rolling the thought of figuring out how to make this into a business just kept going through my head. We looked at all kinds of ideas from flour, whole grains, restaurants, baked goods etc. For feasibility, the flour and pre-packaged products just seemed like it would be the easiest option.
In the spring of 2020, when covid hit and the scarcity of food became a real threat, I felt it was time to really get working on setting up a way to make our family farm products into food that we could easily use for ourselves and for our community.
While in our area we have many different types of food grown here, many of them are sent somewhere else to be processed and made into different food products. This was made very real to me during this time and many others saw it too, particularly in the meat market. Right away meat became harder to get. Between labor storages, panick buying across the nation, and many other factors, processing plants became swamped and were not able to process a lot of the beef that it raised right here.
Many people have ventured out in business to help eliminate this issue in our ranching community. However, the farming side still needs a lot of work to make it easy to have our wonderful farming products available to feed our families here in our communities and in our great country. One reason I think that this is such a hard market to get into is there is little to no regulations for small grain processing plants.
It took me two years to get started mostly because no one knew the answers to any of my questions. What kind of food license did I need, what building requirements did the plant need to have, what requirements for the labels were necessary, etc. It took a lot of time, phone calls, and research to find the answers to be able to get started.
To be continued...