Brownberry was founded in 1946 by Catherine Clark, a remarkable woman who believed that commercially available white breads were tasteless imitations of what bread should be. So she baked her own bread using a traditional family recipe of freshly milled wheat. Everyone praised its wholesome flavor and texture. She truly enjoyed baking, and believing that people would be willing to pay more for the flavor and texture of real homemade wheat bread, decided to enter the baking business. Convincing her husband, a bank officer, to take out a $7,000 mortgage on their home, Catherine then bought an oven, a mixer, a second-hand delivery truck, and an old grocery store to use as her bakery. In 1946 she fired up the oven and began baking hearty wheat bread. Watching fresh loaves coming from the oven, she said, “brown as berry”, and named the small company, Brownberry Ovens. Catherine began supplying a few grocery stores in Milwaukee, and one grocer in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin and found that the bread was disappearing from the shelves faster than she could supply it. On Saturdays, Catherine and her husband would travel to neighboring towns with a car of freshly baked Brownberry bread, a jar of butter and a breadboard, and handed out samples to passerbys. She knew that once people tasted her bread they would buy it. As the popularity of her bread’s unique flavor and texture grew, she extended the line to other varieties of wholesome breads, and adapted recipes for large-scale production. With sales more than doubling every year, she expanded operations, building a $400,000 plant in Oconomowoc. The plant has grown several times, and is still the major bakery of Brownberry products. In 1972, Mrs. Clark merged Brownberry with the Peavey Company in Minneapolis, providing fresh bread for the new eastern markets. Brownberry is now part of the George Weston Bakeries family of fresh baked goods and today Brownberry is still baked according to Catherine Clarke’s original recipe, the old fashioned-way – one batch at a time.