On a recent Friday morning, Diljān, a tiny Afghan bakery in tony Brooklyn Heights, was even more crowded than usual. Bryan Ford, the bakery’s co-owner, and Kevin Morse, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Cairnspring Mills, the maker of Ford’s preferred flour, had set up a makeshift table out of a stack of 50-pound sacks. On it was a box with naan-e-roghani, a deeply ridged, seed-speckled flatbread, which they tore pieces from as they chatted with customers.
Ford, who has hosted and judged shows on Netflix and HBO, has written two successful cookbooks and has an Instagram following 300,000 strong, gets plenty of fans in the shop. But when one avid sourdough baker swooped in for a photo, it was with the flour guy from rural Washington.
Morse, dressed in boots, jeans, a blue plaid shirt and a baseball cap, looked around at the commuters and athleisure-clad customers and said: “Remember that show ‘Green Acres’? I kind of feel like that, coming from the country to the city.”
If Morse was surprised at being recognized in New York, he shouldn’t have been: Craft flour is having a moment, and not just in artisan Brooklyn bakeries.
Premium flour producers are benefiting from a convergence of recent health trends that’s been supercharged on social media: Fiber-maxxers, GLP-1 takers and adherents of the Make America Healthy Again lifestyle, or MAHA, are all seeking out less processed, more nutritionally dense and easily digestible foods.
Big food brands are courting these customers with prebiotic soda, fiber-branded Sun Chips and fries made without seed oil. Even Jell-O, which has never been known for its natural appearance, announced a new line on Wednesday that will be made without synthetic colors or artificial sweeteners.
High-end bakeries and restaurants, meanwhile, have embraced premium flours simply because they taste better and are more sustainable than conventional options. Cairnspring, for example, has built its reputation by supplying foodie favorites like California’s Tartine bakeries, where the sourdough bread has transcended its “cult status,” and Phoenix’s Pizzeria Bianco.
Morse was visiting Brooklyn from Washington’s Skagit Valley to spread the word about a major expansion of his business. Cairnspring will soon open its roughly $55 million Blue Mountain Mill on land owned by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, near Pendleton, Ore. The facility will be capable of producing an additional 110 million pounds of flour a year. Cairnspring’s current mill produces about eight million.
The new mill should give Morse the economies of scale needed to attract and supply a wider range of retail and wholesale customers. Right now, the retail price of a five-pound sack of Cairnspring Mills Sequoia T85 all-purpose flour is $18, compared with around $5 for a typical retail brand of all-purpose flour.
The ultimate goal for Cairnspring Mills, Morse said, is to “do for flour what Blue Bottle did for coffee.” That is, to create a premium but accessible product tier. Doing so at a national level isn’t just a branding exercise. In a category that has a few jumbo producers at the top, and a sea of tiny independents at the bottom, “establishing the missing middle infrastructure requires meaningful scale to create impact and achieve viable unit economics,” all while supporting regenerative agriculture at scale.
‘Nothing weird added’
For the past 15 years, Hayden Flour Mills in Gilbert, Ariz., has extolled the virtues of locally grown and milled heirloom varieties of wheat and grain. And for most of that time, the main draw was superior flavor. Lately, “there’s definitely something shifting,” said a co-founder, Emma Zimmerman. “We’re seeing more customers that are just, ‘I only make my own bread. I do not eat processed bread.’ Some customers are so knowledgeable and dogmatic about it.”
What’s changed? “Maybe it’s MAHA,” Zimmerman said.
At Olmo, an upscale bagel shop in New Haven, Conn., the owner, Craig Hutchinson, said he had noticed a similar shift. Olmo uses 82 percent high-extraction flour from Ground Up grain of Holyoke, Mass., and malt that it mills in-house in its dough.
Because high extraction flour is milled from whole grain with a small percentage of the bran sifted out, it retains more of the grain structure than standard bagel flour. Many customers find the bagels are easier to metabolize and digest, Hutchinson said. Even so, “we’re not marketing it as health food. It’s still a bagel.”
But the process creates a product that aligns with what GLP-1 and MAHA folks are looking for: whole grains, traditional fermentation. “Nothing weird added,” Hutchinson said.
“Nothing weird added” is another way of referring to the “clean label” cravings that are motivating both consumers and regulators the world over. Case in point: Legislators in New York recently passed a ban on potassium bromate, a popular flour conditioner that “makes doughs springier, stretchier and more consistent” but has, in some studies, been linked to cancer.
When Mintel, a market research company, asked consumers what features would make them more likely to buy packaged bread, “premium flour” — that is, more expensive flour — was the top choice for millennials and Gen Z, ahead of options like added protein, organic certification and seasonal flavors, said Lynn Dornblaser, a client adviser.
Fast riser
Cairnspring Mills’ revenue grew 51 percent between 2023 and 2025, Morse told DealBook, and operated at a 41 percent gross profit margin. Even so, new financing had been elusive, said Dan Miller, the founder and C.E.O. of Steward, a commercial lending platform that provides credit financing to regenerative farms and to participants in regional food systems, including bakeries and grain and flour mills.
“Consumer demand has shifted over the past one or two decades, but the availability of financing is totally unchanged. So the businesses that are now serving that new demand are stuck, unable to get financing,” Miller said.
Steward designed the financing strategy for Morse’s expansion, lending Cairnspring $35 million for the construction and another $9 million for the inventory line when it opens up, Miller said. In addition, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation made a $5 million equity investment in the project, with a further $9 million coming from Mission Driven Finance, a San Diego-based firm focused on impact investing.
The largest mills, operated by giants like Miller Milling, Ardent Mills and General Mills, can turn out more than a billion pounds of flour a year. Morse aspires for Cairnspring Mills to occupy the middle ground between those giants and a burgeoning interest in boutique mills that serve small regions or even individual bakeries.
Ford, the co-owner of Diljān, believes Morse is well positioned to meet this growing demand. “I think the new currency moving forward — especially for bakers and chefs, but I think for everyone — is going to be, what’s real? What’s been manipulated the least?” Ford said. “Cairnspring Mills is onto something here.”
