The
Crunchiest
of All
WHIT HEMPHILL, LEFT,
AND BRAD AVERILL
IN WILDTIME FOODS'
PRODUCTION FACILITY
Wildtime Foods makes tasty local granola By Daemion Lee
Snacks
& dips
From dessert-like confections to the
perfect summer party snack, Cosmos
Creations in Junction City has you covered.
This company does amazing things with
puffed corn. Its “Salted Caramel” snack
is sweet, crunchy and melts in your
mouth, while “Spicy Sriracha” tingles on
the tongue. Cosmos started in 2004 but
expanded in 2012 to its production facility
in Junction City, and has been cranking out
addictively delicious oven-baked corn ever
since. Look up cosmoscreations.com to get
your snack on.
You can trust De Casa Fine Foods to
supply all the salsa, hummus, bean dip and
tortillas needed for dinner or a football
party. Manufactured in Eugene, De Casa’s
tortillas come in a variety of sizes, from
adorably miniature “snack” size to hefty
“burrito” size. All tortillas are vegan and
pair well with De Casa’s salsas, which
come in mild, medium and hot. See the full
line of products at decasafinefoods.com.
g
ranola is a health food and a symbol of the
natural foods movement, and the word itself is
sometimes used as a mildly derogatory epithet
to describe a health-obsessed hippie.
Whit Hemphill and Brad Averill, co-owners
of Wildtime Foods, which produces Grizzlies Brand granola,
say they embrace granola and all it stands for.
“There’s something real tangible to it and direct about it,”
Hemphill says about granola. “It’s not some mushed-up thing in
a bar or in a powdered shake or something like that.”
“You just look at it,” he says of granola, and see that you
“could have made it.”
Wildtime has been in business for 35 years, and in 2014, it
relocated to a larger building in the Whiteaker, where Wildtime
makes granola as well as trail mix, muesli and salted nuts.
From the outside, the Wildtime Foods building looks like
any other office. It’s the smell that gives it away, a mixture of
cinnamon, oats or nuts, depending on which recipe is being
prepared that day. Inside, the ovens are giving off heat and
people with aprons work steadily on the next batch of granola.
From this building, tucked away on 2nd and Van Buren next
to the railroad tracks, Wildtime sends its Grizzlies granola to
health food stores and co-ops across the West.
As perhaps is fitting, one of the original founders of the
company was a musician, Doug Clark, who was trying to earn
a bit of supplementary income. Clark, who was also involved
with The Eugene Comic News, started making granola bars in
1981.
The company has since changed owners, but it has continued
more or less doing the same thing. Each batch is relatively
small, between 25 to 35 pounds, depending on the recipe. Many
of these recipes have been around for years, like the organic
Swiss muesli, its best seller.
“I definitely think that what makes us unique is the small-
batch, handmade process,” Hemphill says. “Most others in the
industry don’t do it that way. It’s much more mechanized.”
Averill adds, “A lot of the places use a belt oven and they
have a huge hopper where the stuff is mixed in. You’re literally
dumping in 100 pounds of oats at the same time.”
They occasionally try new things as well, like the American
Beauty granola, a tribute to the Grateful Dead. This granola has a
salted maple flavor, a decision they made after sending samples
to two former members of the Grateful Dead for feedback.
The move to the Whiteaker was a big transition. Previously
the company was based in Glenwood, and the building there
served its purpose for a long time, but the space was just too
small, limiting storage and requiring workers to constantly
slip by each other. Their excitement about the new building is
evident as Averill and Hemphill point out the boxes and bags
and bins stacked floor to ceiling in the two-story storage room.
“When we knew we were going to move, we really analyzed
the workflow at each workstation and each process,” Averill
says. “So when we came over here we could design those to be
much more efficient.”
Business is going well for now, and the company is seeing
new demand from places like Fred Meyer. And every day, the
UPS truck comes and picks up the 25- to 35-pound boxes of
granola to be shipped to stores from Oregon to Montana and
northern California.
“Our idea is to continue to make craft, hand-made stuff,”
Hemphill says, “and have it be something that is identifiable as
a quality Oregon-made product.” ■
For more, see grizzliesbrand.com.
WILDTIME FOODS WAS
FOUNDED IN 1981
EUGENEWEEKLY.COM/CHOW
PHOTOS: TODD COOPER
CHOW SUMMER 2016
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