September is Whole Grains Month, the ideal time to take a close look at the changing world of whole-grain ingredients. To analyze ingredient trends, the Oldways Whole Grains Council (WGC) recently mined its database of more than 10,000 products bearing the Whole Grain Stamp. We compared 800 products from 2007–2009 with an equal number of products from 2015, and discovered some interesting trends, showing that manufacturers are moving beyond dependence on a few familiar grains and are now exploring the full palette of textures and tastes that whole grains have to offer.
The most startling difference we found was a dramatic drop in wheat as the first ingredient: 59 percent of earlier products using the Whole Grain Stamp had whole wheat as their primary whole-grain ingredient, while only 32 percent of the 2015 products were wheat-centric. As might be expected, gluten-free grains are filling some of the gap: 39 percent of earlier products featured a gluten-free grain, such as brown rice, as the first ingredient, but that number had risen to 60 percent in the 2015 sample.