After more than three decades in the bread business, St. Louis-based Companion Baking, at 9781 Clayton Road in Ladue, is taking a closer look at one of its most essential ingredients: flour.
The artisan bakery recently announced a new sourcing partnership with Kansas-based Farmer Direct Foods, a flour milling company focused on regenerative agriculture and supply chain transparency. Through the partnership, Companion is now sourcing flour milled from regeneratively grown wheat cultivated by Midwest family farmers, giving the bakery something it previously lacked: full visibility into where its grain comes from and how it was grown.
For Companion founder and owner Josh Allen, the move represents the next step in the company’s broader sustainability efforts.
“We’ve done a lot of sustainability work inside these walls: waste reduction, composting, 1% for the Planet. Those are things we can control. The harder piece has always been the flour. It’s the foundation of everything we make, and for most of our history we had no real visibility into how the grain was grown or what it took to get there,” Allen said. “Farmer Direct Foods has a program you can actually trace: specific farms, specific practices, specific farmers growing wheat the way it should be grown. That’s not a label claim. That’s accountability all the way back to the field. That’s why we made this change.”
Founded in 1993, Companion Baking has grown from a local bakery into a regional supplier, developing private-label bread programs for grocery chains and custom products for restaurant groups and foodservice operators across the Midwest. Its clients include Schnucks, Fresh Thyme, Sprouts, Urban Chestnut Brewing Company, Salt + Smoke, Niche Food Group and Cameron Mitchell Restaurants.
The new flour partnership will support a portion of those programs, connecting St. Louis consumers and businesses to a network of farmers hundreds of miles away.
Farmer Direct Foods oversees the grain supply chain from start to finish, working directly with contracted family farms throughout the Midwest before milling wheat at its facility in New Cambria, Kansas. The flour is then distributed to bakeries like Companion through partners including Bono Burns.
Unlike conventional flour sourcing, the company emphasizes traceability from seed to finished product. Companion can identify not only where its wheat was grown but also the farming practices used to produce it.
Those practices include regenerative agriculture techniques such as low- or no-till farming, which are designed to improve soil health, reduce chemical inputs and help capture carbon in the soil. Farmer Direct Foods says it also supports participating farmers through premium grain payments and profit sharing.
Steve Sewell, vice president of bakery foodservice sales at Farmer Direct Foods, said partnerships like this help create demand for regenerative farming practices.
“Companion is exactly the kind of partner we built Farmer Direct Foods to work with. When a bakery like this chooses to source regeneratively sourced flour, it sends a real market signal to the farmers doing the hard work of transitioning. That’s how this model is supposed to work,” Sewell said.
For Companion, the partnership reflects a growing interest among food producers and consumers alike in understanding not only what goes into food, but where those ingredients originate.
In an era when terms like “local” and “sustainable” are increasingly common, Companion’s latest move aims to bring a higher level of accountability to an ingredient that often remains invisible: the flour behind the loaf.
