Alberta oats for the millions

The best-selling breakfast cereal in North America gets its healthy profile thanks to a big serving of Alberta-grown oats.

Parents, how’d you like your kids to eat a breakfast that’s low in fat, high in fibre, with protein and a dash of beta-glucan?

Guess what? They already are, most likely. The product is Cheerios, the best-selling cereal in North America. Cheerios is made of whole-grain oats, and virtually every last oat in Cheerios is Canadian-grown, with a significant portion of these coming from Alberta. While the famous yellow box is a common sight on the province’s breakfast tables, the Alberta farmers who grow oats for Cheerios must be uncommonly good at what they do.

Minneapolis-based General Mills, which makes Cheerios, has a one-third share of the $12 billion North American market for ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. That takes a lot of oats, so much so that in 2001, General Mills bought 12% of the entire Canadian oat crop. In other words, around 300,000 acres of Canadian oats are Cheerios-in-waiting.

Even though oats from Manitoba and Saskatchewan are closer to the company’s Minneapolis-area processing plants, and therefore cheaper to buy, General Mills has a soft spot for oats from the western Prairies.

“Alberta raises wonderful oats,” says General Mills oat buyer Ray Lottie. “Your climate is ideally suited to growing superior oats. You get warm days, cool nights and lots of daylight during the summertime.”

What makes a great oat?

When you buy oats on the scale that Lottie does, you can afford to be picky. He notes that the physical and nutritional qualities of oats play a key role in whether they’re selected for the big dance in Minneapolis.

“We look for oats with a clean physical appearance and optimum food value,” says Lottie.

He explains that the oat is composed on an outer shell (called the hull) and an inner portion (called the groat). The hull is fibrous, without much nutritional value. Because the hull is lighter than the groat, a heavier oat is likely to have a higher proportion of groat, and therefore have more food value. Heavier oats – as measured by the weight of a standardized bushel of them – are more desirable for this reason.

“We like our oats to have a clean, white colour, which Alberta oats are known for,” says Lottie, “although tan-coloured oats are also acceptable.”

Follow the oat to market

Lottie buys most of his Alberta oats through Agricore United, a farmer-owned grain cooperative with grain elevators across the province. The oats are shipped by rail from Alberta to General Mills’ two Minneapolis-area processing facilities.

He compares a good oat to a fine wine, improving with age. “An oat that’s right off the field tends to be too sticky for our purpose,” Lottie explains. “Once the oats have aged for a few months, we clean them to foodgrade quality.”

The oats are mechanically dehulled; by slamming them into a steel ring at just the right speed, the hulls fall away, leaving 100% nutritious oat groats. The hulls are channelled into non-food uses, and the groats are conditioned with heat to preserve their food value through the production process. The cleaned, dehulled, conditioned groats are shipped to General Mills cereal plants across the U.S. where they’re made into Cheerios.

Says Lottie: “A bowl of Cheerios packs a lot of nutrition, and that’s due in large part to the quality of the oats. Alberta’s a great place to grow oats, and we’re pleased to be a major buyer.”