The Chieftain®Difference

Dry Roasted Wild Rice®
Not Parboiled

Our Mission Statement

At Chieftain® Wild Rice Company, we strive to provide our customers with the highest quality wild rice products and customer service available in the market today. We will accomplish this by providing total quality service, value added products, information, assistance, guidance and direction.

Wild Rice…A synopsis

Wild rice has been harvested “in the wild” for hundreds of years. It has only been about thirty years that wild rice has been “tamed” and has become a stable agricultural crop. The majority of wild rice is grown in California. California currently produces approximately three times the wild rice that Minnesota does. The major difference between California and Minnesota wild rice is how it is processed. Most California wild rice is par-boiled. We at Chieftain® Wild Rice Company, Dry Roast our wild rice. This process is explained below.

Company Profile

We are a wild rice grower with telephone sales and distribution operations in Spooner, Wisconsin. Our wild rice is grown on 450 acres in Aitkin, Minnesota. We have been delivering one of the best wild rices to chefs in four and five star restaurants for over 45 years.

Chieftain® Wild Rice Company is unique in that we have total control over the quality of our wild rice—we accomplish this by growing, processing, harvesting and distributing our own crop of wild rice.

Rice River Processing

In 2001, Chieftain®needed a way to insure that our unique wild rice would be available long term to our customers. That is when it was decided that we would invest in our future by building a state of the art processing facility close to our wild rice fields in Aitkin, Minnesota. This was the first wild rice processing plant built in Minnesota in twenty years. Rice River Processing provides the wild rice needed to support sales and marketing operations located in Spooner, Wisconsin. The processing plant was the final step in allowing Chieftain®to become a fully integrated company.

The Chieftain®Difference DRY ROASTED WILD RICE®

We Dry Roast our wild rice down to approximately 5% moisture, compared to 8% to 16% in some of our competitors wild rice. Dry Roasting ours to 5% moisture allows you to pay for the rice and not the additional water weight. In addition our Dry Roasted Wild Rice® has a unique nutty flavor not the grassy or earthy flavor that you may find in a parboiled, high water content wild rice.

Scarifying is a process in which the hull of the wild rice is scratched, allowing the kernel to fully blossom during cooking. Benefits include:

• This gives our wild rice a high yield of 4 to 4½ cups of cooked wild rice from 1 cup of uncooked instead of a 3 to 1 yield of most other wild rices.
• Often time the texture of wild rice is described as “like chewing sticks”. Our wild rice is preferred because of its softer texture, which enables you to taste the "meat" of the rice.

The wild rice is then graded and packaged in 2000# totes and 50 pound bags and shipped to our headquarters in Spooner, Wisconsin.

Dry Roasted Wild Rice®

Dry Roasted Wild Rice®--Our 100% Minnesota Grown Wild Rice is Dry Roasted and scarified to offer the nutty taste of quality wild rice. Our wild rice is different! Most wild rices will yield 3 to 1. You can expect a 4 to 1 or greater yield with our wild rice. What this means to your customers is they could be paying more for grassy tasting wild rice when they could be using Dry Roasted Wild Rice® and saving money thanks to excellent yields.

 

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Chieftain® Wild Rice Company manufactures products in a facility that handles Treenuts and Wheat products.