Greymill Brands began in 1997 with a single product: a housemade marinara sauce that James Whitmore had been perfecting in his Chicago kitchen for years. After convincing three local grocery stores to stock it, he leased a small production facility in Chicago's West Humboldt Park neighborhood and incorporated Greymill Foods, Inc. — named after the old grain mill that had occupied the building before him.
The first decade was built on hard work, regional relationships, and a stubborn refusal to compromise on ingredients. Crestline Kitchen grew to 45 SKUs by 2005, distributed across Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana. When private equity firm Lakefront Capital Partners made a minority investment in 2006, Whitmore used the capital not to scale distribution fast, but to improve sourcing — locking in partnerships with tomato growers in California's San Joaquin Valley and olive oil producers in Andalusia, Spain.
"We didn't want to be a company that grew fast and then had to quietly change what was in the jar. We grew slowly on purpose so we could keep the promise on every label."
— James Whitmore, CEO & Co-founderThe 2008 acquisition of Stoneleaf Pantry marked Greymill's first step beyond its condiment roots. Stoneleaf, a Midwest staple known for cold-pressed cooking oils and aged vinegars, brought a new set of categories, a loyal Walmart customer base, and — most importantly — a team that shared Greymill's values around ingredient integrity. The combined business crossed $100M in revenue by 2011.
By 2017, Whitmore recognized a fundamental shift in how American consumers were thinking about food. Wellness, clean labels, and ingredient transparency had moved from niche to mainstream. Greymill launched a formal strategic review and made a decisive bet: pivot the entire portfolio toward better-for-you positioning. Every brand would be reformulated to remove artificial preservatives, synthetic dyes, and added sugars within three years. It cost roughly $18M in reformulation and packaging redesign — and it paid off.
The 2019 acquisition of Fieldwell — a scrappy snack bar brand with a cult following on Target.com — accelerated the pivot. Under Greymill's infrastructure and retail media investment, Fieldwell grew from 600 retail doors to over 20,000 in three years. The brand's DTC sales tripled. Rohan Mehta, who joined as Director of Ecommerce Insights in 2023, helped build the digital commerce infrastructure that now supports all four brands across 40+ retail channels with 552 active SKUs under real-time monitoring.
In 2021, Greymill made its first brand-from-scratch bet: Breva, a functional hydration brand conceived internally by the product team and launched DTC-first on Amazon and greymillbrands.com. Breva hit $10M in direct revenue in year one, expanded into Whole Foods and Target in 2023, and reached $72M by FY2025. It is now Greymill's fastest-growing asset and is expected to surpass Fieldwell within two years.
Today, Greymill Brands employs approximately 850 people across its Chicago headquarters, a production facility in Joliet, IL, a co-manufacturing network spanning five states, and a sales team embedded with key retail partners in Bentonville, Minneapolis, and New York. The company remains privately held and majority-owned by the Whitmore family.