North Carolina farms grow lots of soybeans, tobacco, and sweet potatoes. Wheat may not come to mind when you think of N.C. agriculture, but a popular snack couldn't be made without it.
The Kellanova bakery is tucked into an office park, just off Weston Parkway in Cary. Inside, a staff of about 700 works in 12-hour shifts to produce Cheez-It crackers.
Ribbons of dough roll through 300-foot-long ovens before being stamped into squares and funneled into plastic bags.
Kellanova, a snack-focused spinoff of cereal-maker Kellogg's, produces 8,000 pounds an hour at its Cary bakery, one of two in the U.S. (the other is in Kansas City, Kansas).
"It started out as a sandwich cracker plant that made cookies and sandwich crackers," bakery director Steve Surovec said on a recent media tour.
Austin Quality Foods, which was founded in Cary, built the bakery in the 1980s. The company was in 2000. Kellogg's bought Keebler the following year and the Cary bakery began making Cheez-Its about a decade later.
"As we saw the decline in the sandwich cracker business, we took the opportunity to leverage our current assets to make Cheez-Its," Surovec said.
Those assets include flour, made from soft red winter wheat grown in North Carolina.
"It's harvested around the beginning of June, typically, on average, we grow around 400 to 500,000 acres a year," according to director Nikki Johnson.
By comparison, wheat farmers in Kansas grow about 7.5 million acres a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Johnson said about 80% of the annual harvest is made into livestock feed, which is used by hog farmers. The remainder is milled into flour for human consumption. Surovec said the in Wilson's Mills dispatches 14 tanker trucks of flour to the Kellanova bakery every day. Consistency is key. "If you pull wheat from different places in the country, it reacts differently. And if we can buy it locally, it's a great partnership," he said.
While Kellanova is a reliable customer, Johnson said North Carolina wheat farmers have planted less in the past year, due to falling prices and rising fertilizer costs. And while wheat prices soared after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, they've since dropped by half.
"The price of wheat shot up to almost $10 a bushel, and now we're at $5.23," she said. "A lot of farmers are either not planting wheat, or they're going to earlier-planted soybeans, because they can make more money from their soybean crop than they can their wheat crop."
Changes could also be coming at Kellanova. Rival snack maker Mars Incorporated has for nearly $36 billion. The deal is expected to close later this year. But bakery director Steve Surovec says he's focused on one job: making the perfect Cheez-It, from North Carolina wheat.
"We have a lot of people that have spent their entire careers here, raised their families, put them through college, their kids through college, and retire here after 35-40 years," he said.
Correction: Kellanova produces 8,000 pounds an hour at its Cary bakery.
