Radical Transparency from One Degree Organics

By Lorrie Baumann

The package of One Degree Organics Sprouted Cinnamon Flax Granola that the company sent me is made of oats from River’s Edge Organics, organic cane sugar from the Cooperativa Manduvira, flax seeds from Rowland Seeds, sunflower oil from Petroagro, cinnamon from Tripper, unrefined salt from RealSalt and tocopherols (Vitamin E) from Food Ingredient Solutions. Roy Brewin, the Farmer at Rowland Seeds, says he’s still amazed by the way that “one tiny little seed can multiply into a handful of seeds.” Margie Brewin is the company’s Office Manager, and she says her company’s products are “chemical free and grown from the heart.”

And although I have to take an interpreter’s word for it, Farmer Syafrizal (Tjap) Nurdin says that he’s been farming cinnamon for more than 40 years. At his farm, after the trees are chopped down, their bark is peeled at the same location and then loaded onto the back of a motorbike and driven down to the warehouse, where it’s dried. The people who are doing the work are dressed casually – they look like they might have picked out their clothes at Walmart, and they seem very serious about their jobs.

I know all this because One Degree Organics puts a QR code on the front and back of each package that leads me back to the stories of each ingredient in that product. Videos show the farmers in their grain fields, the workers in the forest in which the trees grew; we hear what they have to say in their own words.

Danny Houghton is the Chief Customer Officer and a co-Founder of One Degree Organics, a brand that belongs to Silver Hills Bakery, a family-owned and operated Canadian bakery that specializes in breads made from sprouted grain. “I actually married into the family,” Houghton said. A year after he joined the family – and the company – his father-in-law, Silver Hills Bakery President Stan Smith – “He’s our leader,” Houghton said – came to him with an idea. He wanted to create a brand for breakfast food products – granolas, hot and cold cereals and organic sprouted flours for pancakes and waffles – that could achieve a single degree of separation between consumers and the farmers who grew the crops that went into the foods that the consumers were buying. He was going to call it One Degree Organics, and he wanted Houghton to figure out how to do it. “It was kind of a crazy idea,” Houghton said.

It was particularly crazy because Smith was talking about a product scaled for the North American market, and he didn’t want Houghton just to figure out how to tell consumers that the oats in their granola might come from any of half a dozen farms – he wanted to be able to tell consumers that the oats inside the particular package they had in their hands came from a specific farm run by a real farmer who has an actual commitment to organic agriculture and the quality of the crop. “Most of our competitors, when they scale, they just call a broker and say they need to up their order,” Houghton said. “We have a very different process…. Everyone is vetted by the company’s procurement team, and then every producer is visited by an involved family member of the company.”

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The next step was deciding how to convey that information to consumers. In theory, that was a problem that had already been solved by the QR code, but Houghton discovered that the problem with QR codes was that many consumers had stopped reading them when they’d learned that many of the codes they were seeing on the backs of packages weren’t providing them with the quality of information they wanted. “We see a lot of our competitors showcase a hero farmer that’s on the back of the box,” Houghton said. “There is a bias there that really frustrates people because so many have abused it. We’ve worked really hard trying to convey to people that there’s a tremendous value to the QR code information, specific to the product that they’re purchasing from us.”

The QR codes on the front and back of One Degree Organics packages lead directly to information about a specific product, and that, in turn, leads directly to the individual farmers who produced the ingredients that went into that product. If there’s ever a change within the production, a new QR code gets put on its package. “You can do that all the way down to the salt,” Houghton said. “Ours comes from a mine in Heber City, Utah – RealSalt…. ‘Down to the last grain of salt’ is the way we often frame it.”

Darryl Bosshardt, RealSalt’s Vice President of Sales, tells us in the One Degree Organics video that the salt deposit is actually located two hours south of the Great Salt Lake underneath what was his grandfather’s farm. The video takes us to the mine from which the salt comes. I’ve been inside underground gold mines, and that’s what a well-managed modern underground mine looks like. Neal Bosshardt, the company’s Product Educator, tells us that the reason this salt is so unique is that it contains 60 trace minerals, “in the form they were in when nature laid it down.”

Providing this degree of transparency is possible only because Silver Hills Bakery already had personal working relationships with each of its suppliers even before Smith came up with the whole One Degree Organics idea, partly because the family behind the company has a real commitment to the nutritional value of its products, Houghton said. “There are two guiding principles: What can we do to maximize nutrition in any of the ingredients in our products, and trying to eliminate any sort of toxin that might be part and parcel of where our grains are grown or in the production process,” he said. “Those are the two anchors that guide our business – maximizing nutrition and eliminating toxins.”

One Degree Organics’ product range includes four SKUs of oats: Quick Oats, Rolled Oats, Steel Cut Oats and Instant Oats, each packaged in 18 and 24-ounce stand-up bags. Granolas include Vanilla Chia Granola, Honey Hemp Granola, Cinnamon Flax Granola and Quinoa Cacao Granola, which is made with lightly sweetened organic oat and quinoa clusters with cacao.