Women-owned and family-run since 2014
That brand is Wild Zora. Freeze-dried proteins were expensive, slow to arrive, and came with rigid minimum order quantities that did not work for a small, family-run company. Instead of waiting on other people's schedules, we built the plant.
The company
Wild Zora came first: a family food brand making meals for people with dietary restrictions, and running headlong into a supply problem. Nobody would make small runs of freeze-dried protein at a price or a lead time that worked. So we built the plant that would.
Since 2014, one of the few independent freeze-drying manufacturers operating under USDA oversight. That independence is the point: small enough to take a 500 lb pilot, equipped enough to run a commercial program, and not answerable to a parent company.
The plant sits in Loveland, Colorado. Everything happens there: heat treatment under USDA inspection, freeze-drying, hammer and cryogenic milling, dicing, and packaging. Nothing is quietly subcontracted to a facility you cannot inspect.
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Ownership
WBENC certification is the verifiable version of a claim a lot of companies make loosely. It matters commercially if you carry supplier diversity targets or bid into contracts with set-aside requirements, and it matters practically because it says something about who makes the decisions.
Certification through the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, which your procurement team can verify independently.
The people who answer the phone are the people who run the equipment, which is why a straight answer arrives faster here than at a plant with a sales layer.
One of the few independent freeze-drying manufacturers operating under USDA oversight, rather than a division inside a larger contract manufacturer.
What is actually in the building, and what it means for a program you are considering here.
Most co-manufacturers can’t handle both, which forces customers to coordinate several vendors for one product. Here, your material stays inside one inspected environment from raw to finished.
With a milling scientist on staff. Most freeze dryers in the country have no milling capability at all.
The seven-minute process at a minimum of 145°F that replaces high-pressure pasteurization and a chemical or radiation kill step.
Gluten and the top nine allergens can be run out of a program, with the line scheduled and sanitized around it.
1510 E 11th St, Loveland, CO 80537. Domestic programs, shorter lead times, no customs fees.
Sister company
Gembra Health is our sister distribution company and the customer-facing side of the same operation. Gembra sells and distributes bovine organ powders. We are the plant those powders are made in.
The split matters when you are deciding who to call. If you want to buy finished product, Gembra is the shorter route. If you want a custom program, your own material processed, or a spec nobody else will quote, start here.
Leadership
A freeze-drying program is a relationship with specific people, not with a brand. Flatiron Food Factory is owned by Josh and Zora, a married couple who built a food company before they built this plant.
Co-owner
The woman-owner behind the WBENC certification. Zora grew up in the Czech Republic as the granddaughter of farmers on both sides, spending summers working the orchards and the animals, and learned to cook by gathering what a meal needed from the garden. It is a long way from a manufacturing floor, and it is also why allergen-free production reads here as a discipline rather than a certificate.
Co-owner
The commercial side, and usually the person on the other end of a quote. Josh and Zora moved their family to Colorado in 2012 after a decade abroad and started making food for people with dietary restrictions, which is the discipline behind running allergen-free production at volume.
The person who responds to your inquiry is someone who runs the equipment. Call (970) 775-8677 and you’ll reach them.
We’d love to meet you at our plant. We would rather show you how something is made than describe it.
Prefer to talk it through? Call (970) 775-8677.
