Some Vermont companies measure their history in decades. King Arthur Baking Company measures its in centuries — and you can taste all of it in Norwich. America's oldest flour company, founded in 1790, makes its home on a welcoming campus at 135 US Route 5 South, just across the Connecticut River from Hanover and Dartmouth College. What began as a Boston flour-importing business is today one of Vermont's most delicious destinations: a flagship store, a working bakery, a café, and a baking school, all gathered in one place in the Upper Valley.
What King Arthur is today is best described as a complete resource for bakers. Flour is still the signature product — precisely milled and never bleached — joined by baking mixes, specialty ingredients, tools, pans, and cookbooks, sold in supermarkets nationwide and directly through its catalog and website. Thousands of rigorously tested recipes are free online, and the Baker's Hotline, staffed by real bakers since 1993, answers questions by phone and chat when a loaf goes sideways. Since 2004 the company has been 100 percent employee-owned, and it is a founding B Corporation — a structure its employee-owners say shapes everything from product quality to community involvement.
The heart of a visit is The Baker's Store, the company's flagship retail shop. Bright and airy, it is a baker's dream: shelf after shelf of flours — all-purpose, bread, whole-grain, and gluten-free blends among them — plus mixes, chocolate, spices, and specialty ingredients that are hard to find anywhere else. There are tools and pans for every project, cookbooks for every level, and knowledgeable staff on hand to help your very best baking, whether you are chasing the perfect sourdough crumb or simply restocking for holiday cookie season.
Next door, the bakery and café give all that flour its delicious proof. Visitors can peek in to watch the bakers at work, then settle in for breakfast, lunch, or a pastry and coffee — breads, bagels, croissants and kouign-amann, sandwiches, soups, and salads, all made on site. Fall brings its own temptations: the café's current seasonal lineup includes apple crumb cake bars, pumpkin whoopie pies, caramel pecan cheesecake, and maple bourbon pecan pie. The café is open daily from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., the store from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and in warm weather the lawn out front is a fine place for a picnic lunch with a view of the Green Mountains' eastern foothills.
The Baking School is where visitors roll up their own sleeves. Classes welcome bakers of every skill level and interest, from introductory demonstrations for beginners to intensive week-long courses for professionals, with hands-on sessions for adults and children on everything from perfect pie crust to baguettes. Families should note the free Kids Drop-In Baking Activity, held in the demo kitchen on the first Saturday of each month from noon to 2 p.m. for ages 5 and up — upcoming dates are November 7 and December 5, no registration needed. Norwich is the school's home, and since 2016 a second King Arthur baking school has operated at Washington State University's Bread Lab in Burlington, Washington.
The history reaches back to 1790, when Henry Wood founded the business in Boston as an importer and distributor of English-milled flour; George Washington was in the second year of his presidency. Benjamin F. Sands took over in 1870, and in 1895 the firm was reorganized as Sands, Taylor & Wood Company, after owners Orin Sands, Mark Taylor, and George Wood. The famous name arrived a year later: George Wood attended a performance of the musical King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and the premium flour it inspired — King Arthur Flour — was introduced at the Boston Food Fair on September 10, 1896, to substantial commercial success.
Control of the company passed to Frank E. Sands in 1917, and the firm weathered a long decline in home baking by expanding into wholesale flour and commercial bakery supply. The Vermont chapter began with Frank E. Sands II and his wife Brinna, the fifth-generation owners, who pared the company back to its core flour business and moved it to Norwich in 1984. The company they rebuilt was tiny — just five employees in 1990, when P.J. Hamel was hired as employee number six to create The Baker's Catalogue for devoted customers who had moved beyond New England and could not find the flour; in the early days, Brinna herself wrapped flour and carried it to the Norwich post office. Brinna is also credited with the vision behind the bakery and school: King Arthur, she felt, would never be complete just selling flour — it had to showcase what the flour can do.
In 1996 the Sands family began converting the company to employee ownership, and the transfer was completed in 2004, making King Arthur 100 percent employee-owned; in 2007 it became a founding B Corporation. In 2000 the company opened the Norwich building that brought its bakery, café, retail store, and baking school together on one campus — a destination CBS Saturday Morning has called "the Mecca of Baking." The company's cookbooks have earned their own honors along the way, including a James Beard Award for Cookbook of the Year in 2003 for The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion.
In July 2020, King Arthur Flour became King Arthur Baking Company — a new name, and a wheat-themed crown in place of the knight on the logo, meant to reflect everything the company does beyond flour. The rebrand landed just months into the pandemic, when home baking surged almost overnight: flour sales in March 2020 ran many times higher than the year before, sourdough pages and Baker's Hotline calls spiked, and the bakers responded with online tutorials and bake-along shows while developing a 3-pound bag to keep home bakers supplied. The happy discovery of those years — that baking together brings people joy — has stayed at the center of the company's mission ever since: inspiring connections and community by spreading the joy of baking.
What's next is growth outward from Norwich, with Vermont firmly as home base. This autumn the company opens a permanent store and baking school at 617 King Street in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia — only its second location combining a store, a school, and event space, after the Norwich flagship — timed, the company hopes, for the holiday baking season, while its Denver pop-up store runs through January 2027. Back home, the Norwich calendar stays full, with monthly dinners in the café (a Friendsgiving feast on November 12 and lasagna night on December 10) alongside the classes and kids' drop-ins. Make a day of it: after your visit, the Upper Valley's trails and river roads are right there — the Green Mountain Club's Day Hiker's Guide to Vermont makes fine further reading for exploring the hills around Norwich before heading home with a bag of flour and a warm loaf. See the full listing on Green Mountain Guide: King Arthur Baking Company.