WILSON’S MILLS, NORTH CAROLINA, US – When a flour mill is located in a region with a booming population, a decision to expand production capacity is almost inevitable.

Few places in the United States are growing faster than the Raleigh, North Carolina, metropolitan area, which has seen its population increase by 6% since 2021 to nearly 1.6 million people. Even more remarkably, the metro area has tripled in size since 2000, adding more than 1 million people.

Andrew Rutter, commercial manager for Bartlett, said the influx of people in such a short period drove the decision to add a third milling line at the company’s Wilson’s Mills facility, which is 25 miles to the southeast of Raleigh in a scenic, heavily wooded area.

“It was a combination of the (population) growing and our customers also growing to serve this expanding market,” Rutter told World Grain during a tour of the mill in November. “It’s enabled us to expand with them.”

The plant, which was built in 2000 and owned by Mid-State Milling until Bartlett, a Savage Company, bought it in 2007, was constructed with future expansion in mind. A second milling line (B mill) was added in 2012, increasing flour production capacity to 15,000 cwts from 10,000 cwts. The third milling line (C mill) began operating in the spring of 2023, about 18 months after the $28 million expansion project began.

Now at 20,000 cwts of milling capacity, Bartlett’s Wilson’s Mills facility ranks as the 23rd largest flour mill in North America, according to Sosland Publishing’s 2024 Grain & Milling Annual.

The first thing you notice about the Wilson’s Mills facility is its physical size — the mill is 10 stories tall, much taller than a typical US mill. When it initially was built as an advanced, highly automated mill 24 years ago, enough space was allotted to expand production capacity by 10,000 cwts. While expanding within an existing building is less expensive, there are challenges, said plant manager Mike Wahl, who had previous experience working on a flour mill expansion project in another state. “It’s cheaper but I’m not sure about easier,” he said. “When you have limited space to fit things, it’s always a challenge. We worked with Bühler and Todd & Sargent to optimize the footprint and to construct a very efficient operation.”

As it has on past expansion projects, Bartlett hired Todd & Sargent, Ames, Iowa, US, to serve as the general contractor and Bühler AG, Uzwil, Switzerland, for engineering expertise and as the primary equipment supplier. Walker Electric & Services was contracted for the electrical installation. The project began in July 2021, when the COVID pandemic was still at its peak and supply chains around the world were snarled. Rutter praised the three companies for keeping the project on track despite having to battle logistics difficulties.

He specifically cited Bühler, which had to make shipments from its global headquarters in Switzerland, for finding innovative solutions to ensure on-schedule delivery of equipment to the Wilson’s Mills plant despite the pandemic-related supply chain constraints.

“Several ports were backed up for months so Bühler’s logistics team found several alternative ports to expedite equipment delivery,” Rutter said.

Significant storage capacity added

Although the mill wasn’t physically expanded, Bartlett chose to add a significant amount of grain, flour and millfeed storage to the facility. GSI Group, Assumption, Illinois, US, supplied two steel tanks, each with storage capacity for 250,000 bushels of wheat. The 500,000-bushel increase brought the facility’s overall capacity to 1.1 million bushels.

Three types of wheat — hard red winter, hard red spring, soft red winter — are milled at the Wilson’s Mills plant. Most of the soft wheat milled at the facility is brought in by local farmers, Rutter said.

“Our goal is to originate all our soft wheat requirements here in the Carolinas,” Rutter said. “Most production years we can do that. The last couple of years have been good harvests.”

The mill’s hard wheat is sourced by rail from midwestern elevators owned by Bartlett, which is based in Kansas City, Missouri, US, in the middle of hard wheat country.

“We added track capacity to support our flour mill expansion,” Rutter said.

Concrete silos with flour storage capacity of 30,000 cwts were also built, and additional bin storage for millfeed, which is transported to area feed mills, was supplied by Laidig Systems Inc., Mishawaka, Indiana, US.  

Inside the mill

Although adding the C mill was the focus of the project, Bartlett took the opportunity to upgrade parts of the A and B mills as well. That included updating the mill’s existing cleaning house.

“We doubled the size of it,” Wahl said. “We added a (Bühler) combicleaner, scourers, aspirators and so forth."

The new milling line, which grinds soft red winter wheat, has tempering capability of up to 24 hours but soft wheat typically only requires 8 to 10 hours of tempering, Wahl noted. After leaving the tempering bin, the wheat runs through a scourer and an aspirator.

It then moves through the milling section, which includes 12 Bühler rollstands — 10 MDDR single-high and 2 MDDT double-high rollstands — an MQRG purifier, two MPAK 10-section sifters, a four-section rebolt sifter, as well as scales and flow controllers.

Before reaching the flour bin, the product is enriched with an additives application system that was installed by REPCO, Salina, Kansas, US. 

A major component of the expansion and upgrade was installing Bühler’s latest control system, the Mercury Manufacturing Execution System (MES), in place of the WinCos system. Rutter said the system processes more data and provides constant monitoring of the plant’s milling process.

Wahl said Bartlett operated the mill with minimum downtime during the C mill installation and the equipment upgrade in the A and B mills.

“Our team did an excellent job of operating safely with all that was going on,” Wahl said. “We may not have required parts of the process to be down, but it certainly required the staff to be working in and around our contractors and project team. That was a challenge in and of itself to continue operating in that environment.”

He added: “Any time you do a retrofit while still running, it’s a challenge.”

In a remarkably short amount of time, the new mill had met its extraction rate targets, Wahl said.

“The C mill achieved its capacity expectations within the first few weeks of production, which is remarkable,” he said.

Sister mill in Statesville

Bartlett also operates a flour mill in Statesville, North Carolina, about 40 miles north of Charlotte, the state’s largest city and also among the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the United States. Since 2000, Charlotte’s population has ballooned to 2.26 million people from 768,000.

The two mills complement each other nicely, and with a combined production capacity of 35,000 cwts, Bartlett holds a dominant position among North Carolinian flour producers with more than half of the state’s total flour milling capacity.

The Statesville mill is an older facility and has a slightly smaller capacity than the Wilson’s Mills plant, said Rutter, who is based in Statesville and has been with Bartlett for 16 years.

“The product lines are fairly similar,” he said. “We both mill hard red spring, hard red winter, and soft red winter wheat. Statesville does mill whole wheat flour as well as having a packaging operation.”

Wahl explained that Wilson’s Mills’ plant transports flour exclusively in bulk with its trucking fleet. Not having any bagged product is unusual, but it does have its advantages, Wahl said.

“It requires fewer people at the back end,” Wahl said. “Being an all-bulk operation allows us to focus on maximizing every aspect of our process to the truck.  Our Statesville operations can support our customers’ flour bag needs, which allows our team here to concentrate all of our resources on a dedicated purpose in the marketplace we serve.

“A continuous mix system was added to the loadout system, which doubled the mill’s capacity for loading flour into trucks.”

Experienced mill staff 

Wahl, plant manager at the Wilson’s Mills facility since 2019, said one of the keys to the mill’s success is the number of longtime team members that oversee the milling process.

“Around 50% of the operations team has been here for more than 15 years,” he said. “A number of team members have been here since the plant opened in 2000.”

Bartlett operates its own transportation group out of the Wilson’s Mills location, employing about 14 full-time drivers that operate a fleet of trucks that deliver flour to its customers.

Rutter said the expanding customer base in the Raleigh area includes a facility that was retrofitted to produce tortillas, a cookie manufacturer that is new to the marketplace, plus growth among its existing customers.

Most customers have made sustainability and traceability a high priority, and Bartlett has developed programs to ensure that the process from farm to bakery is transparent, Rutter said.

“We originate wheat directly from producers and control that supply chain,” he said. “The soft wheat we originate directly from producers and local elevators. The hard wheat comes from our grain elevator network in the Midwest that originates directly from producers.

“The relationship we have with producers allows us to support sustainability projects with our customers. We control the supply chain all the way to the delivery to the bakery. This is something that continues to grow across our different product lines.”

Although Bartlett has not announced any plans for future expansion at Wilson’s Mills, it will have the capability to do so, even though there is no more room in the recently expanded mill.