Made in Alabama: A Small, Good Thing Fast Rising
By Kelli Dugan
Using the dinner table as her canvas, Peggy Sutton is equal parts artist and cook, but now she can add another, more profitable, variable to the equation: entrepreneur.
A personal quest to maximize the nutritional quality of her diet led Sutton to discover sprouted flour five years ago. Today, the company she and her husband, Jeff, created is the second-largest manufacturer of the product in the country, with a supply contract with the mother of health food retailers, Whole Foods.
Using what she calls the “traditional, artisanal methods of our ancestors,” Sutton launched To Your Health Sprouted Flour Co. in her own kitchen, serving a few friends without the time to undertake the time-consuming process.
Word-of-mouth spread quickly to regional community-supported agriculture cooperatives, though, and four years ago she converted her barn into a commercial kitchen and became licensed as a food processor.
Today, the Fitzpatrick, Ala.-based company, located about 25 miles east of Montgomery, employs four people and recently relocated to a 7,200-square-foot facility also in western Bullock County that was built by Jeff Sutton.
To Your Health makes milled-to-order flour from organic grains, including wheat, spelt and rye. The grains, Sutton says, are sprouted, dried and milled at a very low temperature to maintain enzymes, vitamins and minerals.
And because the flour is milled on demand, she says it never sits on warehouse shelves, ensuring the “freshest, most nutritious whole-grain flour possible.”
Sutton says her personal research into improving dietary substance revealed it is often the processing of foods that makes them less healthy. Whole grains, she learned, naturally contain a substance called phytic acid that actually blocks absorption of minerals such as calcium, iron and zinc.
Properly sprouting and fermenting whole grains prior to grinding, however, neutralizes the phytic acid and improves the body’s ability to absorb the grains’ minerals.
In addition to supplying mom-and-pop and agricultural cooperatives across the country, Sutton says To Your Health is rapidly gaining a foothold among national retailers.
The company already holds contracts with Whole Foods Market, the world’s fifth-largest retailer, to provide more than 5,000 pounds of organic, sprouted flour each week to three regional bakeries in Massachusetts, Colorado and Texas.
“We’re also a retail vendor of theirs, meaning they carry our flour in their retail stores, and we’re currently putting together additional contracts with their national bake houses for moving forward,” she says.
Of course, web sales are a large component of To Your Health’s rapidly expanding customer base that currently includes patrons in Canada and Great Britain, and Sutton says sales have been brisk in 2010.
“We had already exceeded last year’s total revenues at the end of the first quarter of this year,” she says.
But with a roomier new milling facility running full speed, Sutton says she is more motivated by the prospect of boosting employment in a jobs-deficient economy than by profits.
“We’ve got lots of growing room here, and the most exciting part is that as business continues to grow, we can continue to create some desperately needed jobs right here in Bullock County,” Sutton says.
Above all, Sutton credits genuine love of the product and for the process for allowing To Your Health to flourish so quickly.
“Every opportunity I get to sprout and bake is pure joy for me. Even after several years of baking, I still get excited every time I make another sprouted bread,” she says, listing apricot almond bread and sprouted flour crackers and brownies among her personal favorites.
Kelli Dugan is a freelance writer for Business Alabama. She lives in Mobile.