Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company: Thirty-Five Years of Heritage Grain in Wolseley
From a 1981 church-basement bread co-op to three Winnipeg locations milling spelt, Red Fife, Kamut, and einkorn onsite — a community-economics profile of one of Canada's most quietly important…
May 1, 2026 · By Justin Plosz · Winnipeg, Manitoba · Community · 12 min read
The Quick Picture
Walk west from downtown Winnipeg along Portage Avenue, turn south past the Manitoba Legislative Grounds, and within a few minutes you are inside Wolseley — a tree-lined residential neighbourhood that locals sometimes refer to, half affectionately and half ironically, as Winnipeg's "granola belt." At the corner of Westminster Avenue and Lipton Street, the original Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company storefront has been baking organic loaves since the autumn of 1990.
The bakery opened on September 8, 1990 with two employees and thirty loaves. Thirty-five years later, it operates three locations across the city: the original Wolseley shop at 859 Westminster Avenue, a stall at The Forks Market on the bank of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, and a third storefront at 390 Provencher Boulevard in St. Boniface, in the heart of Winnipeg's francophone east side.
The bakery is structured around a small set of principles that have not shifted in the time it has been operating. Grain is grown organically, with no pesticides, by farmers in Manitoba. Heritage wheats — spelt, Red Fife, Kamut, and einkorn — are ground into flour onsite at The Forks. The people who work at the bakery are paid a living wage. The farmers who grow the grain are paid a fair share of the price the loaves eventually sell for. The customers who walk in to buy bread are part of a circle the bakery describes, in its own language, as "respecting in the circle" — respect for the earth, the farmer, the staff, and the customer.
1981: The Church-Basement Co-op
The story does not start in 1990. It starts in 1981, in a Wolseley living room.
A group of neighbours in the area had decided, in their own words, that "living as neighbours included sharing their lives in the spirit of peace and with a devotion to the earth." That conviction took the form of a multi-denominational congregation called the Grain of Wheat church. The bakery idea was born in conversations among church members.
For the five years before the storefront opened, the project ran as a bread co-op. The site of operations was the basement of St. Margaret's Anglican Church on Westminster Avenue, with overflow milling and baking happening on the front porch of co-founder Tabitha Langel's nearby home. Flour was milled there from local grain. The loaves were not sold in any conventional retail sense — they were distributed within the co-op and the surrounding community.
This is where the bakery's identity was formed. Tall Grass Prairie did not start as a small business looking for a market. It started as a group of neighbours making bread together because they thought it was the right way to live. By the time the storefront opened in 1990, the operating principles — organic grain, local farmers, fair pay, communal accountability — had been worked out over five years of practice. They were not branding decisions. They were habits.
That sequence matters. A great many businesses adopt mission statements after the fact and then spend years trying to align their operations with the language. Tall Grass Prairie did the opposite. The operations came first. The mission statement came later, because the operations had already produced one.
September 8, 1990: Thirty Loaves and Two Staff
The community that had spent five years baking in a church basement decided, by the late 1980s, that the project had outgrown its informal setup. About C$40,000 in community investment was raised to establish a proper shop. The location chosen was 859 Westminster Avenue, a few blocks from the original co-op site.
The founding group included Tabitha Langel, Ray Epp, Nancy Pauls, Sharon Lawrence, and Lyle Barkman. The bakery opened on September 8, 1990, with two employees and thirty loaves on the first day's shelf.
Those figures are worth pausing on. Thirty loaves is a domestic-kitchen output, not an industrial one. Two staff is the size of a household. C$40,000 in 1990 dollars was meaningful but not transformative — it was enough to outfit a small storefront and not much more. The point of citing them now, thirty-five years later, is not to romanticize the modest beginning. It is to make a structural observation. A bakery that opens at this scale, with this kind of community capital, has to grow in a particular way. It cannot scale faster than its grain supply, its baking capacity, or its trust with customers will allow.
Tall Grass Prairie has grown — to three locations, to onsite heritage-grain milling, to a wholesale and catering business — but it has done so at a pace that has not broken the original model. That is unusual. A great many community-funded bakeries founded in the 1980s and 1990s either stayed at one storefront indefinitely or scaled into a model that quietly abandoned the founding principles. Tall Grass has done neither.
Heritage Grains, Milled Onsite
The most distinctive operational decision Tall Grass Prairie has made is to mill its own flour from heritage wheats, daily, at The Forks Market location.
The heritage stack the bakery works with is unusual even by the standards of serious independent bakeries. Spelt is the bakery's main wheat. Spelt is a member of the wheat family with a long history in European agriculture. It is often tolerated by people with mild gluten sensitivity and has a low glycemic index. Tall Grass embraced spelt in 2004, building it into the bakery's core offering well before spelt had become a routinely available specialty grain in Canadian retail.
Red Fife was introduced in 2015. The bakery now uses it in all of its breads and buns and most of its sourdoughs. Red Fife is a Canadian heritage wheat with a documented role in the development of the prairie wheat economy. The bakery's own description is that "this ancient wheat has remained unaltered by genetic modification." Kamut, an ancient relative of durum wheat, and einkorn, one of the oldest cultivated wheats in the historical record, complete the heritage line milled at The Forks.
Milling onsite is not a marketing flourish. It changes what the flour can do. Whole-grain flour begins to oxidize from the moment it is milled, which means freshly milled flour produces noticeably different bread than flour that has been bagged and shipped. A bakery that mills its own grain daily is closer, structurally, to a nineteenth-century miller-baker than to a modern industrial bakery. Tall Grass has chosen that operating model deliberately, and at scale.
The grain itself is sourced organically, with no pesticides, from farmers in Manitoba. The bakery treats the relationship with those farmers as part of the same circle that includes its staff and its customers.
"Respecting in the Circle"
Tall Grass Prairie's operating philosophy has a name: "respecting in the circle." The phrase appears repeatedly in the bakery's own language. The circle, as the bakery describes it, contains four parties — the earth, the farmer, the staff, and the customer — and the bakery's job is to extend respect to all four at the same time.
In practice, that means several specific things. It means a living wage for everyone who works at the bakery, rather than the lowest legally permissible wage. It means a fair economic share for the organic farmers whose grain the bakery uses, rather than the lowest price the bakery could negotiate. It means using grain grown without pesticides, in keeping with the bakery's stated commitment to support small-scale organic farmers and to help change perspectives on how food should be grown, made, and tasted.
The bakery also displays a land acknowledgement on its website. It acknowledges the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg, Dakota, and Ininiwak, and also acknowledges the Anish-Ininiwak, Dene, and Nehethowuk peoples; the homeland of the Métis; and the First Nations of Treaty One. This kind of acknowledgement has become more widely adopted across Canadian businesses in the last decade. Tall Grass Prairie's version is notable for being unusually specific about the peoples named.
None of these are revolutionary practices in 2026. What is unusual is that Tall Grass has been operating along these lines, in essentially the same form, since 1990 — long before living wages, organic certification, and land acknowledgements were widely adopted retail values. The bakery did not adopt these principles in response to a market shift. It practised them first, and the market caught up.
The 2005 Inflection Point: Loïc Perrot
By the early 2000s, Tall Grass Prairie was an established Winnipeg institution with two locations — Wolseley and, since 2002, a stall at The Forks Market. The bakery's identity as a heritage-grain, organic, community-rooted operation was secure. What it did not have, at that point, was a deep European-pastry capability.
That changed in 2005, when Loïc Perrot joined the team. Perrot is a fifth-generation baker from Brittany, in the northwest of France — a region with one of the most demanding bread cultures in Europe. He helped perfect the bakery's croissant recipe and added many French pastries to the menu. He is now part of the current ownership group alongside Tabitha and Paul Langel and co-founder Lyle Barkman.
This is the kind of detail that often gets glossed in profiles of community bakeries. A bakery's identity tends to be told in terms of its founding principles and its founding people. The technical depth that takes a bakery from a respected community shop to a bakery that can credibly hold its own against any operation in the country usually shows up in the kitchen. In Tall Grass Prairie's case, that depth arrived in 2005.
The practical effect is on the menu. Tall Grass is still, fundamentally, a bread bakery. But behind the bread sits a viennoiserie programme — croissants and French pastries — that reflects a generational depth of training rather than the borrowed recipes of a typical North American bakery. The two famous products the bakery is best known for predate Perrot's arrival: the Folk Festival cookies (oatmeal, sunflower seed, coconut, and chocolate), described by the bakery as "infamous in these parts," and the whole wheat cinnamon bun, which Tall Grass calls "a Winnipeg specialty." The current pastry case sits between those local touchstones and a French viennoiserie tradition that has been folded into the operation for the last two decades.
Three Locations: Wolseley, The Forks, St. Boniface
Tall Grass Prairie operates three locations across Winnipeg, each with a different role in the city's daily rhythm.
The Wolseley shop at 859 Westminster Avenue is the original. It opened on September 8, 1990 and has been operating continuously on the same corner ever since. The hours are Monday to Friday from 7am to 6pm and Saturday from 7am to 5pm. This is the neighbourhood bakery in the most literal sense — the daily-loaf source for the residential blocks immediately around it, and the place where the original 1981 co-op community consolidated into a storefront.
The Forks Market location at 1 Forks Market Road opened in 2002. It is open daily from 7am to 7pm. The Forks is the historic confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers and one of the most heavily visited public sites in Winnipeg. It is also the location where Tall Grass mills its heritage grains daily — spelt, Red Fife, Kamut, and einkorn — into the flour that supplies the rest of the operation. For visitors to the city, this is generally the most accessible Tall Grass experience.
The St. Boniface shop at 390 Provencher Boulevard sits on the east side of the Red River, in the heart of Winnipeg's francophone neighbourhood. It serves a customer base whose daily food culture has long included a strong artisan-bakery tradition.
In addition to the three storefronts, Tall Grass offers catering and wholesale, supplying restaurants and event clients across the city. The wholesale business is the part of the operation that extends the bakery's heritage-grain practice into kitchens that would not otherwise have access to onsite-milled spelt or Red Fife flour.
The PRC Editorial View
The reason Tall Grass Prairie matters, editorially, is that it is one of the few examples in Canadian retail of a community-economics model that has actually held its shape across thirty-five years of operation.
The bakery has done several things that are individually difficult and collectively rare. It has stayed locally owned, by people who have been in the operation since the early years. It has expanded to three locations without losing its founding philosophy. It has structurally aligned its sourcing, its wages, and its community presence with the ethics it described at the founding. It has kept its grain supply within Manitoba and its milling within its own walls. It has folded in technical depth — Loïc Perrot's viennoiserie discipline since 2005 — without softening the original identity. And it has remained widely affordable, in a category where heritage-grain organic bakery is often priced as a luxury good.
None of those moves are quietly impressive in isolation. Together, they describe an operating model that almost no other Canadian bakery of comparable size has fully sustained. Most heritage-grain bakeries are smaller. Most community-funded shops have either remained at one storefront or scaled into a model that abandoned the original commitments. Most three-location urban bakeries do not mill their own grain. Tall Grass does all of these things at the same time.
The bakery's own language for what it is doing is the simplest available. "Respecting in the circle." Earth, farmer, staff, customer. Bread that begins in Manitoba fields, is milled in a public market on the bank of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, and is sold across the counter in Wolseley, The Forks, and St. Boniface to people who pay a fair price for it. The model is not new. It is just rare. After thirty-five years, Tall Grass Prairie is one of the few Canadian bakeries still operating it at full strength.
How to Visit
Three locations are open to the public.
The original Wolseley shop is at 859 Westminster Avenue, Winnipeg, MB. Hours are Monday to Friday 7am to 6pm and Saturday 7am to 5pm. This is the daily-loaf neighbourhood bakery and the historical heart of the operation.
The Forks Market location is at 1 Forks Market Road, inside The Forks public market complex on the bank of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. Hours are daily, 7am to 7pm. This is the site where Tall Grass mills its heritage grains — spelt, Red Fife, Kamut, and einkorn — daily, and the most accessible location for visitors to the city.
The St. Boniface shop is at 390 Provencher Boulevard, in Winnipeg's francophone east side.
Tall Grass Prairie also runs catering and wholesale operations for restaurants, event clients, and institutional customers across the city. For current product information, location-specific updates, ordering, and catering or wholesale inquiries, the bakery's website at https://tallgrassbakery.ca is the authoritative source. The site also displays the bakery's land acknowledgement and the long-form expression of the "respecting in the circle" philosophy in its founders' own words.
Key takeaways
- Origins go back to 1981 in Winnipeg's Wolseley neighbourhood, where a group of neighbours formed the Grain of Wheat church and ran a bread co-op in the basement of St. Margaret's Anglican Church and on the front porch of Tabitha Langel's home.
- The first storefront opened on September 8, 1990 at 859 Westminster Avenue with two employees and thirty loaves, supported by about C$40,000 in community investment.
- Founders: Tabitha Langel, Ray Epp, Nancy Pauls, Sharon Lawrence, and Lyle Barkman. Current ownership group includes Tabitha and Paul Langel, Lyle Barkman, and Loïc Perrot.
- Operates three Winnipeg locations: Wolseley (859 Westminster Avenue), The Forks Market (1 Forks Market Road), and St. Boniface (390 Provencher Boulevard).
- Mills four heritage wheats daily at The Forks: spelt (main wheat, embraced 2004), Red Fife (introduced 2015), Kamut, and einkorn. Grain is organically grown by Manitoba farmers.
- Operates by the "respecting in the circle" philosophy — earth, farmer, staff, customer — with a living wage for staff and a fair economic share for organic farmers.
- Best known for its Folk Festival cookies ("infamous in these parts") and its whole wheat cinnamon bun ("a Winnipeg specialty"); also offers catering and wholesale.
- Loïc Perrot, a fifth-generation baker from Brittany, France, joined in 2005 and brought French viennoiserie depth to the menu.
Frequently asked questions
- What is Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company?
- Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company is an organic, heritage-grain bakery in Winnipeg, Manitoba, opened on September 8, 1990 at 859 Westminster Avenue in the Wolseley neighbourhood. It now operates three locations across the city and mills heritage wheats — spelt, Red Fife, Kamut, and einkorn — onsite at The Forks.
- Where did the bakery come from?
- The project began in 1981, when a group of Wolseley neighbours formed the multi-denominational Grain of Wheat church and started baking together as a bread co-op in the basement of St. Margaret's Anglican Church and on the front porch of co-founder Tabitha Langel's home. Five years later, about C$40,000 in community investment helped establish the first shop, which opened on September 8, 1990 with two employees and thirty loaves.
- Who founded Tall Grass Prairie?
- The founding group included Tabitha Langel, Ray Epp, Nancy Pauls, Sharon Lawrence, and Lyle Barkman. The current ownership group is Tabitha Langel and her husband Paul Langel, co-founder Lyle Barkman, and Loïc Perrot, a fifth-generation baker from Brittany, France who joined the team in 2005.
- Where are the three locations?
- Wolseley (original): 859 Westminster Avenue, open Monday to Friday 7am to 6pm and Saturday 7am to 5pm. The Forks Market: 1 Forks Market Road, open daily 7am to 7pm. St. Boniface: 390 Provencher Boulevard.
- What heritage grains does Tall Grass use?
- The bakery mills four heritage wheats daily at The Forks: spelt (its main wheat, embraced in 2004), Red Fife (introduced in 2015 and used in all breads, buns, and most sourdoughs), Kamut, and einkorn. The grain is grown organically, with no pesticides, by farmers in Manitoba.
- What does "respecting in the circle" mean?
- It is the bakery's founding philosophy — respect for the earth, the farmer, the staff, and the customer. In practice, it means organic grain from Manitoba farmers, a living wage for staff, a fair economic share for organic farmers, and a stated commitment to support small-scale organic agriculture and to help change perspectives on how food should be grown, made, and tasted.
- What is the role of Loïc Perrot?
- Loïc Perrot is a fifth-generation baker from Brittany, France who joined Tall Grass Prairie in 2005 and is now part of the ownership group. He helped perfect the bakery's croissant recipe and added many French pastries to the menu, bringing French viennoiserie discipline into the operation.
- What are the bakery's most famous products?
- Two products in particular are widely associated with the bakery: the Folk Festival cookies — oatmeal, sunflower seed, coconut, and chocolate, which the bakery describes as "infamous in these parts" — and the whole wheat cinnamon bun, which Tall Grass calls "a Winnipeg specialty."
- Does Tall Grass offer wholesale and catering?
- Yes. Catering and wholesale are both offered, supplying restaurants, event clients, and other customers across the city. Details and contact information are available on the bakery's website at https://tallgrassbakery.ca.
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