OSU-developed purple wheat variety brings new health benefits to wheat products

Thursday, March 12, 2026

Media Contact: Alisa Boswell-Gore | Office of Communications & Marketing, OSU Agriculture | 405-744-7115 | alisa.gore@okstate.edu

OSU-P92 is not your standard winter wheat variety.

This latest Oklahoma State University wheat variety, released by OSU Ag Research in January 2026, doesn’t just have the standard resistance to leaf and stripe rust and high baking quality. It also contains anthocyanins, the same food pigments found in pomegranates and blueberries, which provide antioxidants that benefit gut and brain health.

“This is new — so new that I only know of a few wheat breeding programs in North America that are commercializing pigmented bran varieties,” said Dr. Brett Carver, Regents professor and wheat genetics chair in the OSU Department of Plant and Soil Sciences. “We were after qualities that are just not normally present in winter wheat.”

Carver said a major push is underway in wheat breeding to increase fiber content. White flour contains around 3% fiber, while whole wheat products contain 11%-12%.

“A big reason we dove into purple wheat is that most people are not consuming whole wheat products, which is where most fiber in flour comes from. Purple wheat might be one way to shift consumers to accepting whole grains,” Carver said, adding that many people claim purple wheat bread tastes better than traditional whole wheat products from red wheat.

“This product can connect us more directly to the consumer, and we need more of that,” he said.

Brady Sidwell, a wheat producer and business owner in Enid, has established a chain of companies that provides food commodity services from selling planting seeds to growers to the cold storage and distribution of fresh milled, stone-ground, whole-grain flour to bakeries, restaurants and food companies, and everything in between.

“We specialize in finding specialty, niche markets where we provide high-value, high-quality products, such as purple wheat, that require special handling,” Sidwell said. “It’s not only delivering the pure, wholesome product that consumers want; it’s also giving agriculture a voice by connecting growers directly to consumers. We can create an identity-preserved product that is truly local. I see it as a form of rural development.”

According to Sidwell, OSU-P92 has the potential to increase local farmers' profit margins and keep more dollars in local communities and the state. It’s exciting to be able to not only connect farmers to consumers and local products but also increase the profit margin for the farmer.”

The special genetics from varieties like OSU-P92, which have end-use characteristics suitable for many wheat-based foods, provide growers with a higher-profit-margin product and consumers with a healthier product. The most important factor to successfully integrating the wheat into the food commodity chain will be emphasizing the variety’s conventional genetics, according to Carver.

OSU-P92 is the result of breeding OSU’s Smith’s Gold hard red winter variety with a Romanian purple wheat called F-Gen14. This hybrid was then crossed with OSU’s Big Country hard white variety. The significance of this is getting the adaptability and disease-resistance traits from Smith’s Gold, the yield, disease resistance and baking quality of Big Country and the health benefits of the purple wheat in one whole grain package.

During development and selection in research trials with OSU-P92, graduate student Everett Daugherty and former Wentz research scholar Georgia Eastham studied the variety’s anthocyanin properties under the tutelage of Edralin Lucas, professor of nutritional sciences in the College of Education and Human Sciences.

“We were amazed to find differences in anthocyanin concentration among genetically similar purple wheat varieties,” Carver said. “OSU-P92 stood out for having three times or more the anthocyanins of conventional hard red winter wheat and exhibited the most consistently intense purpling of the bran across many environments.”

Growing

The added health benefits of OSU-P92 are not just a draw for milling and baking companies. It’s also an appealing factor for farmers.

“We need to do something to create more demand for bread, so the possibilities of this new wheat with its health benefits are that it could increase consumption,” said Alva organic wheat farmer Bob Baker, who has grown OSU-P92 for the last two seasons and currently has 288 acres planted.

Baker said while the variety’s purple quality is its appeal, it’s also a challenge for growers. It is important to provide a pure product, so producers must make sure there is no residue from other wheat varieties left in their machinery. He invested in new wheat augers to have separate machinery for milling purple wheat.

“Carver is really onto something. I’m really impressed with this wheat,” he said. “The challenge for producers in the future will be the start-up cost. It’s going to take several years for this to mature as a niche market, but when we introduced it on a limited basis, it was well received.

Carver said the new facilities at the Agronomy Discovery Center will further advance what the OSU Wheat Improvement Team can do with wheat genetics in their breeding program. One of OSU Agriculture’s initiatives is planning and fundraising for the new OSU Agronomy Discovery Center to upgrade OSU’s existing Agronomy Research Station with a new headhouse, research greenhouses and a multipurpose Research and Education Center.

“Continued innovation like this one requires a different ‘assembly line’ from our mainstream wheat breeding efforts, where we introduce genetic stocks from across the globe that need ideal growing conditions to successfully produce progeny from them,” Carver said.

 

Milling

From a milling perspective, the OSU-P92 wheat performs “beautifully,” according to James Brown of Barton Springs Mill in the Austin, Texas, area.

He said the product has all the “graham cracker robustness” one would expect from a whole-grain product, which means the entire wheat grain is milled. Conventional industrial milling, also called roller milling, uses multiple stages of grinding and sifting to remove the bran and germ of a grain product, leaving only the endosperm from the interior part of the grain to make flour. Stone milling is grinding the entire wheat berry between two stones.

“When it comes to stone-milling it as whole grain flour, the purple wheat flour maintains the bronze, grain color and the aroma and taste with the finished product, so I see nothing but positive there,” Brown said.

Brown said he does not know how the product performs with roller milling, but the purple wheat is not intended to be used that way.

“If a mill took the wheat berries out of it, they would be giving away all of the things that make this an interesting and great product,” he said. “If it didn’t taste and smell good and perform well, people would still be interested in the health aspects, but it has to do those other things first before it can make an appealing food.”

Brown sells flour to industry and independent bakers across the country. He said his customers have told him they are grateful he is selling purple wheat because, until now, they had to buy purple wheat flour in Canada. Customers have been asking him when he will have more of the product.

“All the feedback we have gotten from both professional and amateur bakers is that it’s fantastic,” Brown said. “The flavor profile is robust like Grape-Nuts and graham crackers. What little flour we had from it, we did not have for long.”

Baking

Kenneth Hilburn of Feral Dough Baking Company in Oklahoma City said he first heard about purple wheat three years ago when he started following a bakery in Denmark, and the anthocyanin properties immediately caught his attention.

Prior to OSU-P92, Hilburn couldn’t get purple wheat flour in the U.S., so he didn’t hesitate to jump on the opportunity to work with the variety.

“I’m constantly thinking about how I can bake with single wheat varieties and turn them into bread. Whole-grain, stone-milled flour is a hot topic right now. You see a lot of bakers racing to try to figure out how to make loaves out of 100% stone-milled flours,” Hilburn said.

Unlike most commercial bakers, Hilburn focuses on the grain product’s quality and lineage rather than the protein content of the bread. That’s why unique, specialty products like OSU-P92 are something he wants to work with.

“The more I’ve worked with specialty flours, the more I’ve discovered that you don’t tell the flour what it’s going to be; it tells you what it’s going to be,” Hilburn said. “The baking properties of the P92 flour are unique. It’s not a strong flour; it’s more akin to a French soft white wheat variety, which can make it slightly difficult to work with, but once you find that perfect timing and consistency for making the product the flour wants to make, you have a great artisan bread. That’s just the nature of a real artisan flour. It already comes with the caveat that it won't be like working with conventional flour.”

Hilburn, who is opening a brick-and-mortar business in Oklahoma City in June, also bakes with OSU wheat varieties Gallagher, Big Country, Butler’s Gold and Stardust, and markets the bread products as being made with these specialty flours.

“The purple wheat variety is still new for the market, but there is a lot of excitement from our bakers and end consumers about it,” Sidwell said. “Bread, particularly fresh-baked whole-grain products, has re-emerged as a popular choice, so having the added health benefit and the newness and innovation in a traditional product is something consumers are excited about.”