Ralph Carlton, Suzanne McDowell, Karen Colberg (left) are the co-CEOs of King Arthur, America’s … [+]
Franco Vogt/The Forbes Collection
Business is booming for America’s oldest flour company.
King Arthur has seen demand for its flour surge almost three-fold in March as a country in lockdown turned to making bread and other baked goods as a way of passing the time.
“It feels like years ago, although it was only weeks ago,” says King Arthur co-CEO Karen Colberg. “We started working with our milling partners to ramp up safely. We asked how quickly can you go from operating at about half-capacity to 24-seven?”
The escalation is aimed at bringing millions of pounds of new flour to stores across the country in the next few weeks, as consumers find some types of flour to be in short supply, including King Arthur’s all-purpose flour, the nation’s second-best seller after Gold Medal. The 230-year-old company sold about 6.1 million bags of all-purpose flour in March, a 268% increase from the prior year.
King Arthur makes the country’s top-selling brand of high-protein bread flour, which has twice the share of its nearest competitor, Gold Medal, and saw sales increase 287% in the same period to almost one million bags. In September and October, typically a slower time for flour sales, the company sold a total of 550,000 bags across all of its brands.
King Arthur was able to meet the initial surge because of the extra inventory it had built for Easter, its second-busiest season, but this year saw the ordering continue well past the mid-April holiday.
“It’s getting the milling and bagging time and then having it make its way through warehouses to grocery store shelves that’s a fairly complex piece of the puzzle,” says Colberg, who joined the employee-owned company in 2005 and is one of three co-CEOs to run the company.
Founded in 1790, King Arthur has made a $150 million sales business out of the low-margin work of buying up flour from millers around the country and selling it in five-pound bags at supermarkets. It’s been a tough business recently, with global wheat prices falling steadily for the past five years, while tastes have embraced alternative flours and grain-free diets. Because it has touted the use of no bleached flours and no bromates (flour-stiffening chemicals that improve rise but have been linked to cancer), King Arthur’s bags typically cost 25% more than more conventional Gold Medal.
Colberg says King Arthur would normally expect baking to drop off largely in summer months, but now expects demand to stay steadily high long-term.
“We didn’t know for how long people would be stocking up,” says Colberg. “What we’re now seeing is it’s becoming a hobby for so many. It’s really become our national pastime.”
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