Free-From Foods Are Changing the Way Your Meals Are Produced

Free-From Foods Are Changing the Way Your Meals Are Produced
Rick Wirt harvests corn on Oct. 22, 2015 near Burlington, Iowa.Scott Olson/Getty Images
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General Mills Inc. spent five years and built a special eight-story sorting facility to get rid of an ingredient that wasn’t in its cereal.

To ensure that some varieties of Cheerios—made from oats and thus naturally gluten-free—didn’t contain even tiny particles of the protein that may have blown in from neighboring fields, the company dispatched a team of engineers to retool machines to sort 1 billion pounds of oats a year.