• Our Purity Guarantee
• Our Purity Process

Cream Hill Estates Three-Stage Purity Verification Process

1. Our crop is inspected.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) does a one time inspection of our crop in the field and reports on crop purity and on the presence/absence of any contaminating crops. The seed grower constantly inspects the crop and removes foreign plants as well.

2. Seed from the harvested crop is analyzed for purity in two steps.

Step one:
After harvesting, samples are sent to a federally-certified seed lab where a trained technician examines every single seed in over 15 kilograms of sample – that's over 600,000 seeds!

All foreign seeds, whether they be crop or weed seeds, are removed from the oats and identified as to the specific type of seed – wheat, barley, rye, canola, corn, weed etc. The technician reports to us on the type and number of foreign seeds per kilogram. If there is more than one wheat, barley, rye, triticale, kamut, spelt or other cereal seed closely related to wheat per kilogram, we do not use those oats.

Step two:
After cleaning by the seed grower, and before delivery to the processing mill, samples from each 1-tonne bag of our seed are again sent to the certified seed lab where the technician goes through the same process described in step one. If any sample from a 1-tonne bag contains any wheat, barley, rye, triticale, kamut, spelt or other cereal seed
closely related to wheat, that bag is not sent to the processing mill.

3. Our miller uses dedicated and/or thoroughly cleaned equipment.

The equipment that processes the oats into flakes and flour is used only for oats and/or it is thoroughly cleaned and inspected to ensure there are no contaminating seeds present before it is used for pure oats.

After processing, the oats are sampled at the mill, and the samples are sent to a certified biochemical testing lab at the University of Guelph in Ontario. There, the highly sensitive and internationally recognized R5-ELISA test shows whether, and if so, how much, gluten is in the finished products. This test is 10 times more sensitive than commonly used gluten detection tests. Our oats consistently test below or near the test's lower limit of detection, which is two (2) parts per million.