#250 - Jacob Trumbull of Roaring Fork Mill: Heritage Grains, Regenerative Organic Certification, and How Startup CPG Opportunities Unlocked 700 Stores

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1:18Our flour has a shorter shelf life because it actually has natural oils in it. You see a flour on the shelf that has a three to two year shelf life. That flour is dead. That's a dead ingredient. That's not doing any good for your body, for your gut. Whereas if you have a flour that has a six month, three year shelf life, that's because it has components in it that are actually alive and help you digest gluten. Hey, everybody. This is Caitlin Bricker, Managing Editor at Startup CPG and not Daniel Scharf, our CEO and founder. I'm taking it as place today again. We've got a very special episode for you today.

1:52I'm sitting down with Jacob Trumbull, founder of Roaring Fork Mill. They're a family-owned stone flour mill based in Carbondale, Colorado. Jacob's created the first fully regenerative organic certified mill in the country, and he's on a mission to bring heritage grains back to the Roaring Fork Valley, all while supporting farmers and transitioning to cleaner farming practices. Jacob won a Shelfie Award in 2025 and went from exhibiting at his first trade show with us to unlocking 700 plus stores in just a month and a half. We're diving into why stone milled heritage flour is easier to digest than what's on most grocery shelves, what it takes to get regenerative organic certified.

2:34It's pretty tough. And how he's reintroducing a wheat variety that hasn't been grown in 60 years from one pound of seed. No pressure, right? If you ask me, Jacob is certainly a leader in the field, and we'll get into just why I think that. As always, enjoy.

2:56Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. This is Caitlin, and today I'm here with Jacob Trumbull, founder of Roaring Fork Mill. Jacob, welcome to the show. It is wonderful to be here. I've listened and watched so many of these episodes, so it's an honor to be on it. We are so happy to have you. Of course, I feel like your list of wins keeps growing. I'm not even going to attempt to name any of them off. I will leave that to you. But before we dive into all things Roaring Fork Mill, can you tell us what you do? Who is Roaring Fork Mill? So we are a family owned and operated stone flour mill.

3:32We're based out of Carbondale, Colorado. We are the first fully regenerative organic certified mill in the country. So all of our products coming out of the millhouse are all regenerative organic certified. We're really proud of. It took a lot of paperwork and a lot of time to get there, but we made it. So we have a wholesale line of flower, a retail line of flower, and then we're also launching a line of value-added products. Amazing. I have so many questions for you. What is it like running a family-owned business, and were you at the epicenter of that, or who from your family said, let's do this?

4:02Tell me the origin story. I was the epicenter, and I still don't know how I convinced so many family members to come along for the ride, but I'm very thankful they do. So, you know, the reason it's worked out well, because working with families hard, same with working with friends, is that we all have such different skill sets. So we all have very different lanes within the business that we function in. But I did found the business in 2022, and we started out just as a wholesale flour mill. And it was really just me for the first eight to 12 months, making connections with farmers, growing some grain ourself, going to restaurants and bakeries.

4:32And, you know, are people interested in locally grown grains, stone milled flour? And very quickly, I realized the answer was yes. And then that's when I started bringing on different family members who had skill sets that would support the business. For example, all of our branding and design work is all of my cousin, Zach. He's an artist, and I convinced him to do our branding and design work. First time we'd worked at a CBG company, so all of our logo creation, all of our branding has all been him. My mother is a baker by trade, so she's developed all of our value-added products. My wife has a background in biodynamic agriculture, regenerative farming, so she does all of our crop rotations and crop planning.

5:08My sister does our operations work. So it really is a family business at this point. Wow. And why flower? Out of all things in the world, why did you choose this product and this plant to work with? It's a very niche field to go into. I used to work at a college up in northern Vermont called Sterling College. And it was based purely on sustainable agriculture. And a lot of the farming techniques were being lost to time. We taught draft horse management. So I had to plow fields and sow fields with draft horses and pulling plows behind. So it was a lot of old style farming techniques. And we started growing heritage grains.

5:45So I learned about how heritage grains are climate resilient. They're more nutritionally dense. Then there's two stone mill makers in the U.S. Stone mills are the equipment that we mill our flour on. And one of them happened to be a town over from Sterling College up in northern Vermont. It's a company called New American Stone Mills. And they make these beautiful stone mills. So I would go over there and I learned about milling, especially the aspects of how it's easier to digest. And especially when you work with heritage grains, how it keeps that nutritional density intact. It adds a lot of flavor to what you're making.

6:13So I knew of heritage grains. I knew of milling. And then when I moved to the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado, it's an agricultural community. And 100 plus years ago, the staple crops were potatoes and wheat. And it shifted away to be a lot of horse ranches and alfalfa production. Alfalfa is very water intensive. So when I was mulling around a business I wanted to start, I knew it would be in sustainable agriculture and food. My family has a history in delis and food. So I've been around food my whole life. It just connected. And I was like, oh, wheat's one of the first things that was grown here.

6:44One of the towns by us was actually named after a wheat varietal that's native to this area. So wheat used to be a big part of our community. But we started bringing it back. Was it an intentional move for you to go to the Roaring Bork Valley because of what you had plans for? Or did it just happen to become a big for you? It just happened. Wow. I moved here for a job. I moved here to work for the Rocky Mountain Institute, which is a clean energy company. And I very quickly realized it was my first real desk job I've had. You know, most of my jobs was hands on. I was in the farms. I used to work internationally for a while.

7:19And you were doing a lot just of moving around, being more place-based in the field. And this is my first time behind a computer all day. Loved the mission of the company, loved the company, but it just was not for me. But sitting behind a computer, I feel like no matter how much passion you have for something, it kills the soul just a little bit every day. There's times now as a founder that you spend a lot of time on meetings, spend a lot of time behind spreadsheets, planning things out. But especially since we make our own product, I always have the excuse of, oh, I need to go in the millhouse and mill some flour and get off from behind the computer.

7:50And I also don't have Fervis in the millhouse. There's like a third of the millhouse that I do have to go in the corner to take calls. So it's a really nice way to disconnect. Millhouse sounds better than the Dow Coast. We'll just say that. I'm super interested in hearing more about your background. You're working at the colleges. You just happening to land in the Roaring Fork Valley. At what point did you say to your family, let's do this? Take me back to that one day where you were like, here's my plan. Who's in? That's a great question. So when I started the business, I was still working in this other company.

8:25And I had this little mill that virtually fit in our garage. I would be on meetings with my headphones on milling flour and bagging flour. And then when the workday was over, I'd go to restaurants and bakeries and test it out. And when I started realizing how much demand there was for the product we were making, how much interest there was, but how much effort had to go into it since we're going to be farming a lot of our own product, we're going to be milling our own product and becoming a vertically integrated supply chain. That's when I really realized like, oh, this isn't just a solo founder initiative.

8:54We're making our own product. I need more hands on the ground. I need more help doing this. And since our family does have a background in food, it made sense to start looking internally. I really just started slowly bringing them on for the fun and exciting projects to get them interested. Smart. Yeah. I started coming out, looking what we're doing. We have bakers in the family. I would send them our flour and they'd realize how the flavor were involved in it. So first getting folks excited. But I do remember that first call with my mother. She's a huge part of the business now. My first call with my mother where it was really like, how about you come on and join the team?

9:26Then I'm so thankful she said yes. I love it. And we keep talking about the mill. I am familiar with stone ground chocolate. Tell me what stone milling flour involves. What does this process look like? Yeah, absolutely. So about 900 pound granite stones. I actually have a crane system to take them apart every once in a while because if you redress them and we put the grooves back in the stones. So the whole crane just to move them around. But there's a hopper where you put the grain in, you put about 300 pounds in at a time. There's an auger where the grain falls down in between the stones. And there's only a couple of things on the mill you can really adjust.

10:02One is the speed of the grain falling in between the stones. And again, each type of grain has a different density. So if you're doing a hard red wheat, doing a soft white wheat, if you're doing a rye flour, a buckwheat, a millet, each of them have different densities that are going to mill easier or harder. So you have to adjust the stones based on the amount of grain you're letting in between them because the pressure of the stones on top of each other is what's pushing the grain into the runner stone. The runner stone stays still. So that's really what you can adjust. You can get a whole wheat flour and then you can also attach a sifter and sift your flour.

10:31And sifted flour is what we do for our all-purpose and our bread flour because it's just a nice, lighter, easier to work with flour. But I do a lot of tours of the mill. I always explain it as a very simple but complex system because all of it's by sound, right? You can't look inside of it. So you can hear if the stones are touching. You never want the stones to touch. You can hear if they're not close enough because it's not grinding right. So a lot of it is just by trial and error to starting out. And then it's experience. It's knowing how much grain to let in at a time, how close to bring the stones.

11:00You can look at the flour when it first starts coming out to make sure it's the right consistency you want. But it's a really fun system, honestly. I've worked in a chocolate factory before. I've never witnessed flour being milled before. Is it a loud process? We used to have to wear like protective headphones when the cacao beans were going into the hopper and the whole process. What is it like with flour milling? I was very concerned when I first turned our larger, more industrialized mill on. once we increased our capacity. I thought it was going to be really loud and actually ended up being quieter than our small meal we had in the garage.

11:37I could do like 10 pounds an hour and it's really not that loud. I still put in the headphones occasionally, but it's surprisingly not very loud. Wow. Yeah. That's a good thing. Got to protect your hearing. It's like a slow whirring noise. Interesting. All right. And this is probably going to be a very elementary question, but I'm assuming everything you do is gluten full and not gluten-free. That is very true. Yeah. There is a big difference though with heritage grains that are stone milled. They are much easier to digest. So if you ever have yourself or know a friend who's gluten sensitive and they go to Europe and they say, hey, I could eat a loaf of bread and I felt totally fine.

12:15I could have pasta and I felt totally fine. It's due to the type of flour that's being used. A lot of our flour now is over-processed and there's glyphosate sprayed on, there's other their herbicides and pesticides sprayed on it that gets into the grain and in turn gets into the flour. Over processing of our flour is really what people can't digest. A lot of genetically modified wheat variety, conventional wheat varieties as well, have been altered to have higher gluten levels than our bodies over time have adapted to because the higher levels of gluten in that white flour that you usually get in the store makes your bread lighter and fluffier.

12:48And during the advent of white bread that has an infinite shelf life is when we started modifying wheat varieties. So our oldest strains of wheat date back about 10 ,000 years. Wow. That's how far I've dated einkorn. And then a lot of our heritage grains date back to about 8 ,000 to 6 ,000 years that we use. And our bodies over thousands of years have adapted to that. So we can actually digest gluten very well as humans. But one of the aspects is the whole wheat portion of grain, the germ and the brand of the endosperm, those components actually help you break down the gluten. So when you have an ultra processed white flour that's stripped out all the living components, the components in there that were stripped out is actually what helps your body break down the gluten.

13:27There's an interesting stat that I saw recently. I believe it was 32 % of the people in the U.S. think they can't have gluten, whereas 3 % are actually celiac. And a lot of that just has to do with how we've over processed and industrialized our flour. Wow. What a visual thinking about like a whole wheat flour, like a nice loaf of bread versus just this very sad white bread in a plastic bag. Our flour has a shorter shelf life because it actually has natural oils in it. You see a flour on the shelf that has a three to two year shelf life. That flour's dead. That's a dead ingredient. That's not doing any good for your body, for your gut.

14:03Whereas if you have a flour that has a six month to a year shelf life, that's because it has components in it that are actually alive and help you digest gluten. Wow, that's definitely something to chew on. I've never thought about flour on a shelf before until just now. So I will definitely be looking at mine under a microscope from now on. Well, you know, we grew up in a generation where we're just used to white flour. That was the norm. You know, that's what we usually get on the shelf. That's what everyone used. It wasn't until the last really decade where these heritage grain stone milled varieties have started to come back.

14:30People are more aware of the ingredients that they're eating and what it's doing to their bodies. I'm very curious about sourcing the seeds to grow these plants because they are ancient grains. Like I'm picturing this vault where you're going in and you're turning like a big lock and you have this like giant skeleton key. What does that process look like for sourcing? Well, it's a really great question because we haven't made the announcement yet, but we are actually bringing on 25 new acres into our own growing capacity that we're going to use as a seed cultivation site. Wow. Because a lot of these heritage seeds are hard to get your hands on.

15:06and we're going to use this as a farm that we can grow hardy seeds to the Mountain West, make sure they're resilient to our climate and then redistribute them out to our farming partners simply to make sure we have the supply. Because we've had some farmers who really want to grow for us, we just haven't been able to find the seed for them to grow. So we're going to start growing it ourself, which is super exciting. There are some varieties that have become more popular that are easier to find, like a white Sonora, which is great for an all-purpose, a tricky red, which is a hard red winter wheat.

15:34But we also have discovered that there's some varieties that we need to go to other seed banks for there's a great organization down in boulder colorado called masa seed foundation and we are actually going to work with them to reintroduce a native wheat variety to our area and they have one pound of it it's a wheat variety called defiance wheat which i had never heard of until being about two years into this business and it was grown specifically in the roaring fork valley and it hasn't been grown for about 60 or 70 years. They thought it was completely gone and they just found one pound of it.

16:07So we're going to reintroduce it to our area and bring it back. But you're right, it can be challenging, but we're going to start growing it ourselves. One pound is not a lot of seed. A little nerve wracking. Yeah. You better not mess this up. I know that's enough. You just like accidentally drop it and it's gone. Oh my God. Wow. No pressure, right? Yeah. All right. Sounds like you've had a lot of achievements with building this business. I mean, vertically integrating. Like, I've never heard somebody so passionate about wheat before. So this is very refreshing to me. I feel like I'm learning a ton right now.

16:42And if retailers are having the same reaction that I'm having listening to you, I know why you're winning. So can you tell us about these wins that you've had? The first one that I am familiar with is you won a Shelfie Award for 2025. And that was my introduction to you and your brand too. And we were all blown away, super impressed by what you were doing. Thank you. I appreciate it. And that Shelfie Award was for our rye flour. As far as I'm aware, the first regenerative organic certified flour in the US to get the ROC certification. Since then, there's a few different mills that have popped up with one or two SKUs of regenerative organic certified flower.

17:23Whereas now we just launched seven SKUs, which we're super excited about, but that really helped. You know, that shelf fee was impactful for us. It put us on the map and it opened up doors and conversations for us to be able to talk to retailers, have a more legitimate story about what we're doing. And since then, we've had a lot of wins. A lot of them have been in thanks to Startup CPG. We went to our first big trade show with you all. We went to the Unify show out in Long Beach. And stemming from that, within about a month and a half. We unlocked, I think we're up to 700 plus stores now. Whoa.

17:56Incredible growth for us. Absolutely amazing. We're launching in most of those in the next week to two months. So as soon as we're off this call, I need to go palletize some things and get them off into trucks to go to AJ's in Phoenix and then Raley's out in California, which is really exciting for us. But yeah, you know, we're launching with a nationwide retailer in June. Then we have a lot of smaller retailers were launching into. And then one of the great things as well about the Unify show is it really helped us understand what those shows are about. It's hard to fully understand it until you're on the ground doing it.

18:30And we started out as a farmer's market brand. So we tailored our pitch every single day at farmer's markets. And if anybody is starting out a brand, I would highly suggest doing farmer's markets. It's almost a way to get paid to work on your pitch. It's a really good way to look at it. And our product has come so far in the two years since we started doing farmer's markets. Something because you get feedback all the time. But then going, leveling up from those farmer's markets to the trade shows was an incredible experience. Wow. So 700 stores and you've been in business for how long? So we started in 2022, but we launched our retail line about a year and a half ago.

19:08So it's been very quick growth on the retail side, which is why we went into the retail section. We were just getting enough people asking about it to put it on their shelves and individual consumers. And then one of the big areas of growth for us is understanding that there's only a certain subsect of people who want to buy a bag of flour. There's a lot more people who want to buy a bag of cookies. So we launched our line of value-added products. We soft launched it about three months ago. It's hitting shelves for the first time next week, really as soon as Rayleigh's and AJ's get these pallets I'm about to ship out this afternoon.

19:39And that's what's really going to change the scope for our business, right? Because we have this really unique regenerative organic certified flour. And now we can make products with that flour that are also regenerative organic. And a lot of retailers right now are looking for that ROC logo. And for us, that's what it's really all about. We started this business not just for a healthy staple ingredient, but to help farmers transition to cleaner and healthier farming practices. And really our mission is based in soil health. So the more bags of cookies or bags of flour we can sell, the more farmers we can support in transitioning their farmland over to regenerative organic practices and more climate resilient grain we can grow.

20:19So it really all comes back to us, to the farmer side and the soil health side. This really is so inspiring. I mean, your passion comes through when you're talking about this. Who knew, right? Like who knew that wheat could do this? Looking back, I would never have assumed that I would be in the flour business, but here we are. Things happen for a reason. I hate to say it. It's so cliche, but they do happen for a reason. And I got to try the cookies. I believe it was at Newtopian Now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In your backyard. Yeah. They are delicious. You know, I used to be such a hater on whole wheat, like, oh, almond mom type deal.

20:54But now I'm like, why would I ever eat white flour unless I was in like a situation where it was an emergency? Absolutely. Those cookies that you've tried actually two days ago just won a big award that I cannot announce yet, but you'll have to keep an eye out for it. So, so cool. And what are your goals retail-wise or wholesale-wise? Where do you envision Roaring Fork Mill going or being in in the future? Absolutely. We do want to continue to grow our retail presence, right? We are positioning ourselves to be a leader in the regenerative space as it comes into fruition and as it grows. We are positioned really well to be a leader in that.

21:37We also have a chance to grow significantly on our business to business side, right? There's a lot of brands who are looking to create a regenerative organic certified product. And there's really only a couple spots you can go to if you're looking to make a baked good, right? There's really only a couple of places you can go to for a flower And regenerative organic certification is all based on weight percentages and ingredient percentages. And flour is often one of the heavier ingredients you're adding into your items. So we have a significant area of growth in business to business sales. We also increased our production volumes.

22:07Now we can start expanding our wholesale 50 pound bag business. So we're starting to work with more restaurants and bakeries. That'll always be a staple of our business, right? That's consistent sales every month. You know how many pallets or how many bags restaurants or bakeries are ordering. but our focus right now is retail growth. We have onboarded the Unify and Kehi. Onboarding quotation marks, we're about a month into the process of onboarding. I still haven't finished the onboarding process, but you'll get there. We will be onboarded soon. We also just onboard with Pod Foods for a certain retailer that asked us to.