General Mills Cheerios - "Our Gluten-Free Story: Journey to Gluten-Free" September 1, 2015 Transcript Provided By: Digital Accessibility by WeCo accessinfo@theweco.com https://theweco.com/ * * * * * This transcript is being provided in a rough-draft format. The transcript reflects the transcriber's best effort to express the full meaning intended by the speakers. It is not a verbatim transcript. * * * * [music plays throughout] [A hard hat with an identification decal for Philip Zietlow, JFB Pilot Plant.] [Phil Zietlow, R&D, Cheerios] I've worked for General Mills for 50 years, and I spent a lot of time working on new breakfast cereals to make them more healthy. [A photo of Phil talking to another man. 1999 Bell Achievement Award for Invention of the Year, which was awarded to Phil Zietlow. Footage of Phil speaking.] That's really what I really, my goal in life was. [Title screen: Our Journey to Gluten-Free] It really hit me about five years ago. [Phil inspects oats at a desk.] My daughter-in-law was diagnosed with being celiac. [A photo of Phil's daughter, holding her child.] That just opened my eyes to this thing. [Phil continues inspecting oats.] So, I dug into it a little bit, and I found out all the oats we use for Cheerios are naturally gluten-free, but when we get them from the farm though, they do have stray grains of wheat, barley, and rye that do have the gluten. Though, how in the world did that grain ever get into oats? It starts in the farmers. [Footage of Phil speaking.] They... they grow one grain in one year and one grain in the next year. And the farmer's gonna use the same equipment to harvest the oats as he does to harvest the wheat or the barley. [Footage of a field and grain bins.] And things get mixed together. It's just part of their supply system. [Footage of Phil speaking.] If you are a celiac, it does affect your life dramatically. So, we're gonna fix that. [Chad Hollowaty, Gluten-Free Project Lead] When we looked at oats and in the grains that contain gluten, they are different in size. What we tried to do is separate out the different size grains from one another. [A hand manually sorting grains of different sizes.] We started out very small with this little concept to say let's prove this out. [Footage of Chad speaking.] And at that time, we were a long ways away from gluten-free. [Phil inspecting oats.] [Phil] I actually found some equipment that I repurposed and used it in a way that it had never been used before to figure out - how do you put the oats through so that you can separate out something that's slightly different in size than something else? [Oats being poured into machinery that spins to sort it by size.] Just using what's there in a little smarter way. [Footage of Phil speaking.] We could run it hour after hour, day after day, we could run oats from last year, from this year, and we could actually demonstrate that this thing really can make gluten-free Cheerios. [The machinery continues sorting oats, Phil makes notes on a clipboard. The oats are inspected after being sorted.] Then we moved to a pilot system. [Footage of Phil speaking.] Pilot system then led us to the bigger system. [Sterling Morrow, Manufacturing Manager, Fridley Mill] This was the most challenging project I've ever had to take on in my career. [Footage of Sterling speaking.] To bring our system up to the scale that Cheerios needs, it required five years of hard work and the construction of seven story tall building where we clean all the grain. [Timelapse of the grain cleaning building being built.] We considered using certified gluten-free oats, but that supply would've only lasted a few weeks. Making a grain gluten-free can be done on very small levels, but when we're talking about a brand like Cheerios, that's the real challenging part. [Grain gets cleaned, milled, and turned into Cheerios.] [April Peveteaux, author of "Gluten is My Bitch"] When Cheerios reached out to me to come check out what they were doing with their gluten-free initiative, I had a million questions. [Footage of April speaking.] Is it really, really safe and is it really, really, like, gonna be safe for me? Because I have celiac disease. [April being taken on a tour of the factory, being shown oats.] I feel like I have a grasp of the way they're doing it, and I feel completely safe, which is not what I expected. [Footage of April speaking.] [Pam Cureton, dietician, Center for Celiac Research] I have a great deal of confidence in, in the product, in the process, and in the people, that they want this to be a safe product that they want to serve to their own family members. [Visitors on a factory tour being shown oats.] [Phil] This gluten-free project is the top thing I have ever done in my life. [Phil walks through a factory with a notebook.] You helped a lot of people out there that really are suffering today that ha- just a lack of good products, and we're gonna help those people. [Phil talks to visitors on a factory tour and works with the oat sorting machine.] So that combination of teamwork, helping other people, wow, this is, this is super. I love it. [laughs] [Footage of Phil.] [music concludes]