- Over the last few years, it seems like American households
have become re-obsessed with baking.
And because of that, supermarkets experienced
an unexpected surge in flour sales, so much so,
that flour was unavailable for weeks at a time.
It seems like the brand that became the real star
was King Arthur Flour.
Bakers obsessed over King Arthur's exacting standards
and consistency, and joined chefs
who were already devoted to the flour.
Today, I wanted to see
what makes King Arthur's flour so special,
and at the same time,
learn the flour-milling process from the ground up.
So there's like some people baking some sourdoughs right now
that I could really screw over?
King Arthur doesn't actually grow or mill its own flour.
They work with reliable partner farms and mills
to get the quality they need.
- (laughing) You ready?
- Yeah. - Okay.
- [Daniel] Today we're actually harvesting the last
of this year's wheat crops with lifetime farmer
Andrew Gee and taking that just over the horizon
to Panhandle Milling to watch how it turns from wheat
to the now iconic bags of flour.
- The disciples were walking through the fields
and they were doing this.
- [Daniel] Okay.
- [Andrew] And that's exactly what the combine does.
- [Daniel] So the combines are just modern-day disciples?
- [Andrew] Right. (laughing)
(light music continues)
(upbeat music)
There's the head, there's the beards,
and then this is a glume that covers the grain.
- Is this the height you want or every year,
it's a little different?
- This is a really poor wheat year
- Really? - In our area.
- Yeah. - Our plant is not as high.
The head is not as big.
It doesn't have as many glumes across.
It's been so terribly dry here,
but you wanna see it maybe that tall.
And the head twice as long as that.
(upbeat music continues)
- When the machine actually cuts,
it's separating at the base?
- The goal is just to get the head.
So the goal is to cut that and get just that.
- [Daniel] So low enough to get all the heads,
but not too low to what, destroy the land?
- Well, you wanna leave as much residue
because the residue holds moisture.
- From here, we hop in the combine to harvest
the last of this year's wheat.
The conveyors coming in makes such magic.
Very simply, the combine works by slicing the wheat
using blades like a beard trimmer.
Then, the reels pull it onto the conveyor,
which brings it into the center.
It's then pulled under the carriage of the combine
where it's broken, and using a series of grates and fans,
the grains are separated from the beards and stems.
From here, it hangs out in the combine
until it's ready to move on to a hopper
and sent to a mill.
So when you're in here,
you're just trying to make sure that your
- All the grains. - That your sickle's
at the right height, your reel's at the right height,
and you're trying to get as much grain as you can
in the pass, as you said, without damaging too much
of the stalk?
- We wanna leave as much residue as we can.
- As much residue. - In the field, right.
- We harvested a lot of the field,
but now, we're gonna send what we got over to the mill?
- Yeah, so we'll load it on the semi
and it'll be ground into flour and sold to King Arthur.
- Do you think it's crazy
that what you harvest from your fields
goes into like some of the fanciest baking goods.
- Oh no, it's awesome that we know the link.
- Right.
- So many people are so far from it.
They have no idea.
It's 2% of the population working their tails off
to feed the world.
It's an honor to do it.
- From here, the grain will be transferred onto a semi truck
and driven over to Panhandle Milling,
where it'll be milled into flour.
Okay, so this here is the weigh station
and this is one of like 100 trucks
that will come into Panhandle Milling today
filled with wheat.
This is where the truck comes in straight
from where we saw it come off the farm.
What happens here is they're gonna weigh it
and they're gonna do some tests
to ensure the quality of the product coming in.
(truck hissing)
So what are you checking on exactly?
- [Brianna] We are checking the moisture and the protein.
So you get it from three different spots.
- Oh really?
- [Brianna] Yes, yeah.
- The wheat all comes in here and then we're gonna
take a quick sample?
- Yes.
(wheat whooshing)
- (laughing) That's so awesome.
The next step for the wheat is the testing room
where the technician measures the protein content
to determine if it's high enough for King Arthur
or whether it'll be sent to another brand.
And then a dockage test,
which measures the level of stones
and other non-wheat material in the sample.
So this is shrunken and broken.
If the wheat isn't pure
and there's too much other stuff in it,
the truck will be sent away.
You got a lotta power in here.
- Yeah. (laughing)
- Is it ever like a tiny bit up and you like the person
and you're like, "Eh, go ahead."
- No. (laughing)
No.
- Amazing, so this is super pure?
- [Brianna] Yes.
- This is good to go? - Good.
- Now the driver pulls away and heads over
to one of the docking stations to deposit his wheat.
All right, so what happens here?
- Flip the lock up, turn the gauge.
(gear clicking)
And it's gonna up, you wanna try it?
- Yeah, sure.
- Just keep spinning it all the way around
'til it's all the way open.
- [Daniel] So why wouldn't you just open it all the way up?
- So, if you got an empty pit, you can
because the pit's big enough.
But, when you open it really fast,
sometimes you'll just fill the whole area with dust.
- Oh, gotcha.
- [Matthew] And so, it's better to control the flow.
- [Daniel] Where is this wheat going?
- Yeah, so this wheat will drop down to the pit.
From the pit, it'll be collected by a bucket elevator.
And a bucket elevator is just basically a conveyor
that's really tall,
full of buckets to grab the wheat
and elevate it all the way up.
And that's where you get the name elevator.
- That's so awesome.
Thank you so much.
From here, Panhandle will store the wheat
in one of 17 silos where it can be held
for up to a year until the factory is ready to process it.
Because we're right at the end of wheat harvesting season,
all these silos are gonna be full.
But by the time the trucks start rolling in again next year,
they'll be mostly empty.
- This is our main flour mill.
We're standing on top of the roof of the flour mill.
So you can see all of our bulk storage for the grain.
And you got a nice view of our elevators.
And then the spouting that we can select
where we're going to store the wheat.
One of the reasons we use elevators
is we can bring it up and then we can use gravity
to our advantage and let the process flow downward.
This conveyor right here is the conveyor
that brings from our bulk wheat storage,
brings it over to the mill.
And we're ready to start the milling process.
- All right, let's go check it out.
The first step in milling is actually just a bigger version
of the testing machine,
which is meant to take out everything that isn't wheat.
Which is mostly rocks, sticks, and corn.
- All of our wheat,
regardless of properties or characteristics,
will go through this machine.
This is called our first break
and it takes the whole kernel here and breaks it once,
and then they got another set of roller mills here
and it does another set of process.
You have two rolls that are rolling together
and the product goes through the middle.
And we actually have,
you have one of those rolls that's moving
a little faster than the other,
and it also has a texture to the roll.
And because one's moving faster,
it creates a shearing action, again,
that's making nice flaky bran that's easy to work with
in the mill.
- [Daniel] After the first grind,
the wheat heads for one of what can be many trips
to the sifting room.
This board is just a visual representation
of the output of these sifters.
Each one of these sifters is doing the same thing,
trying to send the flour to the most appropriate roller
or all the way to bagging.
All of this is for efficiency.
The goal is to get the flour to finer than 212 microns
in as few passes as possible
so they can clear the line and bring in more wheat.
After the first cracking, about 3% of flour is fine enough
to go straight to bagging,
but the rest will be sent back and forth
from sifter to roller, to sifter, to roller,
up to about six times before it's ready to go out.
- So the conveyor that runs through the middle of the room,
it's our patent flour conveyor.
So every spout that you see hitting this conveyor,
the flour's in its patent or finished form.
- What does this look like to you?
Like all, - Like a spiderweb.
- Like a spiderweb?
But do you see the matrix of like this one needs
like an extra little grind and this one needs to be?
- Yeah, yes, so a good miller,
they'll visually know what each pipe's happening.
- Do you think you could do it?
- Yeah - Yeah.
- Our millers that do this day in and day out
and that live and breathe this, yeah, they know it
like the back of their hand.
- [Daniel] The flour is now finally ready
for the packaging line, but first, it's time to clean off.
(air whooshing)
(light music continues)
Next up is the packaging line.
What I've learned about milling to this point
is that they need to be as fast and as flexible as possible.
So, on this line, they're actually running
25-pound bags of their house brand.
But on the next two lines over,
they're running two different SKUs of King Arthur.
- Two different pack sizes and two different configurations
of the bags.
So, these are single units.
These are bundled together,
six five-pound bags in a bundle.
And as it goes down the line,
you can see how they get shrink wrapped together.
- So they're finally letting me do a job
and put these bags on the line here?
- Which is the most important job
is to keep this magazine full.
- All right.
(machine whirring)
And I f***** it.
(laughing)
I got it, I got it.
There's a reason I shouldn't do anything.
- Now, the best thing too, Dan,
is to tap the top to make they're all flat.
No product interruption.
- This identification number on top of here,
that'll trace you all the way back to the farm?
- That is correct. - Field?
- We can do a recall within four hours
of a bag of flour and trace it back to the field.
It's part of our certification.
We have to do that and actually, King Arthur requires it.
This identification code,
the letter is our packer, the date that's best if used by,
and the time stamp and DA is the plant
that it was manufactured.
- I love that in all of the genius machinery
that went into designing these lines,
the best way they figured out
how to flatten the bag was by using the previous one
as a door stop.
- Absolutely.
You think about very simple technology
that allows for the most efficiency.
- It's so fun when it happens.
You were saying that this is really
the identifier here of the King Arthur, right?
- Absolutely, it's the quality of the flour,
11.7% protein is the target,
which is very unique in a retail world.
- And what does that mean?
That means that there's only so much wheat
you can accept for this bag?
- That is correct.
We need at least 12.7 to 13 protein wheat
in order to mill at 11.7 flour.
- [Daniel] In one of the final tests for King Arthur flour,
the bags are broken open
and the protein content is measured one last time.
- This is NIR, or near-infrared,
and it shoots beams of light at the flour
and tests for our moisture, our protein content,
and also something we call ash.
- If this is outside of the range,
then you'll send it back
and either combine it with protein content
that's lower or higher, or just send it off
to one of your other products, right?
- Yeah, we do have a rework process.
Everything gets used.
- After the packaging line,
it's time for Panhandle's final test,
which is actually a baking test,
where they bake all sorts of things
to see how the flour stands up.
So this is like the final stage of King Arthur?
Like this is no joke, really do bake things in here?
- Yes, yep.
- To test it out? - We have a full kitchen
to be able to bake test items.
- [Daniel] But how do you know
you're not just horrible at baking
and how you do you know if it's the flour's fault
or your fault?
- I've always liked baking and I've always been good at it,
so I think that I'm pretty good at it.
- [Daniel] Have you ever done a bake test
and then you're like, "I gotta call someone?"
What can go wrong? - Yes.
So, especially with our mixes
- Oh, that makes - Every once in awhile,
- A lotta sense, yeah. - You'll get
not enough flour in the product,
like something in the PLC system happened
or they put too much salt or sugar
or they swapped the two.
- So you call, like, "Hey, it's Jordan from the bakery.
You gotta hold the line."
- Yeah, pretty much, yep.
- Can we all reach in?
- Yeah, let's go. - Yeah, go right ahead.
- So you see no problems in this?
- [Jordan] No, I think the flour performed very well.
- As do I.
(laughing)
- [Daniel] Now that we've had our muffin
and wrapped up King Arthur's final flour
quality control test,
it's time to see the bags palletized and sent out
into the world.
Here we actually ran into Brad Heald,
who is the director of mill operations for King Arthur.
He was on-site today doing a quality control check.
- We're kind of at the end of the line.
- Yeah. - For their process, right?
And this is the beginning of our process,
when we take possession of the flour.
- So how many of these mill partners do you have?
- We have about 15 mill partners that we utilize.
- [Daniel] What's it feel like watching
these pallets of flour?
- I love it, I love to see our label.
I love to see it out there and being delivered.
- What's the thing that's the biggest sort of thorn
in your side?
What is the thing
that you're always having to keep close touch on?
- Well, each year provides different challenges for that.
So sometimes it's sourcing and price.
Sometimes it's on time delivery.
But what we do at King Arthur year-over-year
is a consistent flour.
So that consumer, when they open that bag of flour
and they want that muffin or that pie crust
that they've done every year,
that experience needs to be the same every year,
and that's really what we strive to do.
- [Daniel] After spending the day
watching King Arthur's process, what I've learned is,
everyone may wanna start baking all of a sudden,
but that doesn't mean they can make high-protein wheat
just magically appear.
It takes farmers like Andrew, mills like Panhandle,
and a lot of luck to produce the product
we've grown to love.
(light music continues)