GRAND FORKS — Farming – and all that it entails – was a constant topic of conversation around the family dinner table when sisters Annie, Mollie and Grace Sproule were growing up. Considering that, it’s small wonder that they eventually found their way back, as adults, to careers in agriculture.

The daughters of Paul and Susie Sproule, of Grand Forks, are building a family-owned pasta business along with their cousin and partner, Michael Sproule, that stretches far beyond the farm fields of the Red River Valley.

Their company, Three Farm Daughters, is delivering products that end up on the tables of consumers across the nation. The sisters are focused on reaching an even wider audience in the future, they say.

These businesswomen – who are also wives and mothers – have carved out a niche in the market, attracting the attention and loyalty of customers looking for healthy, high quality, nutritional pasta products in the increasingly popular farm-to-table movement.

They are educating more people nationwide who might know little or nothing about North Dakota or the goodness that comes out of the ground in this region.

Their products, made of 100% natural wheat, are available in four shapes: elbow, rotini, penne’ and cavatappi. They are sold to individual customers online and through 440 grocery retailers around the country.

“By the end of 2023, we’ll be in 1,200 locations across the U.S.,” Annie said.

Three Farm Daughters pasta appeals to consumers who want to know where their food comes from, what’s in it, and how it’s made, the sisters said.

The women have “combined forces to bring better wheat from the field to your kitchen,” according to an online post by Kowalski’s Market, one of the many grocery chains that sells their products. The Woodbury, Minnesota-based Kowalski’s was the first to introduce Three Farm Daughters products to the Twin Cities retail market.

When it comes to running the Three Farm Daughters business, each sister brings unique strengths and talents to the table. Grace is focused on marketing, Mollie handles supply chain issues, and Annie is responsible for managing finances and projections.

In their north Grand Forks office, which is currently being remodeled, “Mollie and I can chat all day long,” Grace said. “We each have a title that we own, and we make our decisions confidently and with support.”

Annie likens their work style to a swim meet.

“We each start out in our own lanes, but we all cross over into each other’s lanes,” she said, eventually coming to agreement — and their own lanes — at the end.

Mollie earned an undergraduate degree in finance and marketing in 2011 at Bethel University in St. Paul and a Master of Business Administration degree from UND in 2013.

Annie earned an undergraduate degree in marketing and finance at Bethel in 2014 and a law degree from UND in 2017.

Grace earned an undergraduate degree in entrepreneurship, human resources and communications in 2017 and an MBA in 2018, both at Bethel. She also recently earned a certificate online as a nutritional therapy practitioner from the Nutritional Therapy Association.

In the marketplace, there’s a “big push to get nutrition from real food — to bring it back to the old days,” Annie said.

Around the world, wheat varieties number in the thousands and each variety has its own unique properties. Three Farm Daughters uses a premium wheat variety that is naturally nutrient-dense and high in fiber and protein, provides fewer calories and has less gluten.

Their products consist of a high-fiber wheat variety, durum wheat semolina, that is also high in prebiotic fiber, Grace said. Their pasta is not enriched and contains no additives. As it passes through the digestive tract, its properties act to increase the body’s immune system and mineral intake.

Cavatappi is the Three Farm Daughters best-selling product, Mollie said, because it has a unique shape, it’s in the premium pasta category, and it’s not always easy to find in stores.

“It’s a good hotdish pasta,” Mollie said.

The sisters also stress the importance of transparency in food labeling, Grace said, noting that some competitors add ingredients “to help them get nutritional callouts” on their packaging.

“We are really lifting the curtain” on food labeling, she said.

In cooking, some other pastas can get gummy or break down, but “ours doesn’t,” Grace said. “Because of that, our pasta makes great leftovers.” Subsequent servings taste freshly made.

The sisters turned to the Northern Crop Institute in Fargo to develop a pasta with these characteristics.

“So often you can have a healthy product, but it doesn’t taste good,” Annie said. The sisters’ goal was to produce food for picky eaters.

Their guiding question, Mollie said, was “how do we create the best food for our family and avoid picky-eater fights?”

Not only were the women steeped in farming from an early age, they also have many relatives who are entrepreneurial, Mollie said, “so ‘entrepreneur’ was not a scary thing.”

After creating a pasta sample that was well-received by family members, they launched a pilot project, making the pasta in small batches, packaging it in cellophane bags, and selling it to 39 retailers, including self-delivery to Hugo’s Marketplace locations.

Consumer response was “incredible and really encouraging,” Grace recalled.

They established their business, filing for their LLC, or limited liability company status, with the state of North Dakota in 2020. Their pasta is produced at the North Dakota State Mill and at Minnesota mills, Mollie said.

“Whenever I’m traveling,” Grace said, “I go into the stores to see how our products are displayed.”

Early on, one grocer explained that, on a high shelf, after some of the bags sold, the others would fall over, making it impossible for the customer to see them. With this insight, the sisters switched to boxed packaging with a base and added color to the package design.

In July 2022, they relaunched with the Whole Foods grocery chain and all the company’s current retailers. They are in about 15 to 20 banner stores, such as Hugo’s Family Marketplace and Hornbacher’s in this region; Kowalski’s and Whole Foods in the Twin Cities; and Fresh Thyme, Meijer, Albertson and Safeway stores throughout the Midwest.

Their products are sold in 37 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Washington, D.C.

“We will be experiencing more growth at the end of this year as well,” Grace said.

The company also ships direct to online customers in all 50 states.

The Sproule Farms operation grows a variety of crops, including wheat, corn, soybeans, sugarbeets, oats, edible beans and canola, on rented and family-owned farmland in Grand Forks, Traill and Steele counties in North Dakota, Grace said.  

The sisters’ parents, Paul and Susie Sproule, have been farming in the Red River Valley since 1993, Mollie said. But further back, the farming tradition runs deep on both sides of the family tree.

The sisters’ upbringing was steeped in farm life and a passion for farming was instilled at a young age. Their parents “(took) the time to truly integrate and immerse us girls into the everyday, nitty gritty of what it looks like to be farmers and entrepreneurs,” according to a post on their company’s website.

As children, the sisters were active in day-to-day tasks of farming, such as delivering meals to the workers in the fields or moving machinery.

About growing up in a farm family, Grace said, “I loved it.”

The sisters grew up and attended schools in town. All are graduates of Red River High School.

Although they moved to the Twin Cities for college, “no big city could win our hearts over forever,” they note on their website.

As they each eventually returned to Grand Forks, they began to integrate themselves back into the family’s farm business.

Their husbands — David Gorder, Steven Ficocello and Jordan Lunski — are very supportive, they said, and serve as a significant source of free labor for the evolving business.

The last of the sisters to move back to Grand Forks, Grace, the youngest, returned in December 2019. She is wed to her high school sweetheart, Jordan Lunski; the couple wanted to raise their family here, she said. They are parents to boys, a 3-year-old and a 6-month-old.

“There’s something really sweet about Grand Forks,” Grace said. “It has such a different feel than a big city.”

“There’s a reason why we came back,” Annie said. “We’re extremely blessed.” Annie and David Gorder have four children, ages 8, 6, 3 and 1.

Mollie and her husband, Steven Ficocello, are raising a daughter, 3, and a son, 6 months.

The women have found that, as sisters in business, it’s a benefit that they’re very aware of what’s going on in each other’s lives and can be there for each other and adjust as needed in the workplace.

The beauty of being in a family business, they say, is that their children can come and go from their office, where the women remain busy, balancing family life and business priorities.

“We’re still in the trenches,” Mollie said. “Every day, you just get up and do what needs to be done.”