Upstarts: From Farm to Plate

Kyle and Travis Nielsen harvest their wheat crop specifically for Grains of Montana.

By Maya Norris, Managing Editor -- Chain Leader, 12/1/2007

Kyle and Travis Nielsen are extending the reach of their family business. The brothers are using the wheat from their 15,000-acre farm in Billings, Mont., to create the baked goods featured in their expanding bakery-cafe concept, Grains of Montana.

"We were searching for some ways to add value to some of the crops that we grow. So it started as a value-added venture. And wheat is our mainstay crop. That’s what Montana is known for: the high-quality wheat that we raise here," says President Kyle Nielsen.

Because the Nielsens had no restaurant experience, they partnered with industry veterans Tom Wilscam and Gary McGill of Cromwell Corp., a Denver-based restaurant consulting and franchising company, in 2004 to develop and franchise the concept.

Reap What You Sow

Grains debuted in 2005 in Billings, featuring sandwiches, artisan bread, pizza and other bakery items. Not only are the sandwiches made with the Nielsens’ grain, but so are the pizza dough, bread bowls for the salads, pancakes, and hamburger buns. Almost every item is cooked in a stone-hearth oven, including pancakes, burgers and omelets.

The best-selling item is the Raspberry Turkey sandwich, $6.25, with provolone cheese, sprouts, cucumbers, tomato, raspberry preserves and honey mustard. The sandwiches come with customer’s choice of multigrain, foccacia, sourdough, rye, whole-wheat or ciabatta bread.

While lunch makes up 50 percent of sales, Grains has diversified the menu to build breakfast and dinner business, which make up 25 percent of sales each. It recently added omelets and pancakes to its breakfast menu. To drive dinner and eliminate the veto vote, Grains offers items such as the popular Big Five pizza, $8.25 personal and $14.25 family, with pepperoni, sweet Italian sausage, mushrooms, onions and roasted bell peppers; and Bacon Cheeseburger, $6.75, featuring all-natural, Montana-raised Angus beef. A small selection of wines and beers helps boost the average dinner check to $10 to $12.

"We feel we have a very well-rounded, three-segment restaurant here as opposed to Panera," Nielsen says. "It is structured around the bakery products. It all starts in the bakery. If we can’t produce the bread or the product that is going to complement this menu, we won’t do it. That’s why the burgers are there and something like lasagna isn’t."

Growing Cycle

As Grains of Montana prepares to franchise, the company is building a 10,000-square-foot bakery after learning that scratch-baking produced a better product than the pre-mixed base it originally used. Professional bakers will par-bake and flash-freeze the products for franchisees, who will finish baking them in the stores.

Grains expects franchisees to open eight units in 2008 in Mississippi, Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Texas and California. Targeting 27- to 55-year-old white-collar customers with medium to high incomes, the company prefers locations in a mix of residential and business areas in metropolitan cities. It costs about $600,000 to open a unit, which averages 3,700 square feet with seating for 100.

Grains of Montana expects to have 150 units nationwide in five years.