[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 139 (Wednesday, August 5, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4937-S4938]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
RECOGNIZING KING ARTHUR FLOUR
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record,
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I would like to take a moment to recognize
a storied Vermont business, King Arthur Flour of Norwich, VT, for their
accomplishments over the years and their commitment to serving the
community during the COVID-19 pandemic Almost as old as the United
States itself, this company was established in 1790, just 1 year into
George Washington's Presidency. It began in Boston, with Henry Wood
importing high-quality flour from England, and has evolved into a
nationally recognized resource for home bakers and a beloved Vermont
company. In 1984, King Arthur Flour moved to Norwich, where the
business grew rapidly. Today, the brand is ranked second in the Nation
for overall flour sales. But the rise to fame doesn't mean they
abandoned the Arthurian principles that their name was inspired by.
In 2004, the family business was officially sold to its employees.
Such an act demonstrates the high value the company places on their
community and their employees. They also continue to source entirely
from American farms, to ensure high-quality production and to support a
sustainable agricultural economy. As always, they guarantee quality and
purity by promising their customers products free of bleach, bromate,
or any artificial preservatives. Through their commitment to their
employees, the community, and to delivering high-quality, responsibly
sourced products, this company truly demonstrates the values and
character of a Vermont business.
King Arthur Flour further confirmed their commitment to serving and
engaging with the community during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March of
this year, Americans were ordered to stay home to slow the spread of
the virus. This led millions of Americans to begin baking at
unprecedented rates. It was not uncommon to visit a grocery store this
spring and see the empty shelves in the baking aisle. Like many other
essential services, King Arthur was tasked with the need to fulfill a
rising demand, while also keeping their employees safe. True to their
character, King Arthur stepped up and did just that. Not only did they
get their products to consumers, they continued to staff the Baker's
Hotline. For the last several decades, King Arthur has been about more
than just selling products; they also want to educate and connect with
people. Inundated with calls and social media engagement from home
bakers, the company's baking instructors, whose jobs were put on hold,
began answering the Baker's Hotline and managing the high quantity of
social media interactions.
When the country needed an at-home pastime, King Arthur Flour
answered the call. I have visited their flagship store in the past and
can attest to the quality of their products and services. I applaud
them for their commitment to serving the national community during such
uncertain times. King Arthur Flour truly exemplifies what it means to
be a Vermont business and deserves enormous praise. Marcelle and I
visit their plant often in Norwich, and I am so proud of all they have
accomplished. King Arthur's story during the pandemic was recently
covered by Melissa Pasanen of the Vermont newspaper Seven Days, and I
request that excerpts of this article be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From Seven Days, June 23, 2020]
How the Pandemic Propelled King Arthur Flour Into the National
Spotlight
(By Melissa Pasanen)
Laurie Furch, a former bakery owner, has answered calls for
the King Arthur Flour Baker's Hotline for almost six years.
Every shift, she handles dozens of questions from anxious
bakers. She's used to troubleshooting problems such as Why
are my cookies taking an hour to bake? Or, Can I substitute
all-purpose flour for bread flour?
But not even the holiday baking season and its deluge of
calls prepared Furch and her teammates for the tsunami of
home baking appeals that struck the weekend of March 14. That
Sunday, the hotline handled a 50 percent spike in calls.
As the coronavirus pandemic shut businesses and schools,
and shelter-in-place orders rolled out nationwide, homebound
Americans were baking at an unprecedented rate--and they
needed help.
Millions of those bakers turned to Norwich, Vt.-based King
Arthur for advice--and for flour to fuel the new national
pastime.
The crescendo of phone calls was something the company
could handle by redeploying staff from its temporarily
shuttered baking education center and retail operation.
Addressing a nationwide run on flour that left grocery store
shelves bare was a bigger challenge.
``Not only were people all learning how to bake,'' Furch
said, ``then Americans decided they all needed flour at the
same time.''
King Arthur started as a regional New England brand and
eventually developed national distribution for its products.
In recent years, when customers from Florida or California
emailed to ask where to buy the flour, they could be referred
to a nearby supermarket.
The pandemic changed that--and shone a national spotlight
on a beloved Vermont company and how it does business.
It's a welcome story that demonstrates nice guys can finish
first.
`The New Hot Category'
Normally, the flour business is pretty sleepy and doesn't
tend to grab headlines.
[[Page S4938]]
Plain wheat flour is a low-margin business that many
consumers consider an undifferentiated, basic commodity.
``If you want to make money, you don't grow potatoes; you
sell potato chips. You don't sell flour; you sell breakfast
cereal,'' explained Jeffrey Hamelman, a certified master
baker and retired original director of King Arthur's Norwich
bakery.
But COVID-19 has affected almost everything, including the
flour world.
March is the slowest time of the year for flour sales,
although it leads up to Easter, which is the second busiest
baking season after the winter holidays.
So Bill Tine, King Arthur's vice president of marketing,
was surprised when, seemingly out of the blue, hotline call
volume took its giant leap in mid-March.
Tine said he recalls a late Sunday evening phone call to
check in with colleagues about the unusual numbers. But,
honestly, he said, that period of time is a blur. King
Arthur, like every essential business, was busy figuring out
how to keep going and keep its employees safe. Then,
unexpectedly, they were simultaneously faced with the sudden
spike in demand for flour and baking advice.
The week of March 16 was when grocery store orders started
to pick up in an unseasonal way. Over the next four weeks,
they leapt 600 percent over prior year sales, Tine said.
There were well-publicized shortages of toilet paper and hand
sanitizer, but, he said, ``It was a little bit of a shock
that all of a sudden flour became, like, the third thing that
started to go out of stock.''
In response to empty grocery shelves, more consumers
ordered direct from King Arthur than ever before, reaching
six times normal sales.
On April 19, the company tallied a new one-day website
traffic high of close to 1 million user sessions and 2.3
million page views. It blew past the previous record of
542,000 sessions on the day before Thanksgiving 2019.
And the orders looked different, Tine said. Direct sales
were traditionally a mix of harder-to-find specialty
products. But now consumers were ordering the core
supermarket item they could not find: King Arthur's signature
5-pound red-and-white paper bag of flour.
While management was scrambling to get those bags back on
grocery shelves nationwide, Furch, her hotline colleagues and
the team that handles social media interactions were on a
neverending hamster wheel.
As call volume snowballed, it started to feel ``like a
continual Christmas season,'' Furch recalled. All told, the
calls, emails, social media interactions and web traffic
across April and May saw a sixfold increase.
Management did what it could to deepen the bench. The four-
person digital engagement team grew to 17, thanks to bakers
and baking instructors whose regular jobs were on hold or
much reduced. The hotline similarly drew on six
reinforcements from within the company, bringing its ranks to
21.
At no time, according to Tine, did the company technically
run out of flour. What it ran out of was enough bagged flour
to feed the newly voracious appetite of Americans stuck at
home.
During the initial spike, Tine explained, King Arthur had
enough flour to fill orders because the pipeline was full in
preparation for Easter. In fact, throughout the whole flour
``shortage,'' he said, there was never insufficient grain or
even milling time to turn the grain into flour. The
roadblocks were bagging capacity and speed of distribution.
Starting in mid-March, King Arthur was in constant
communication with its milling and distribution partners to
add shifts and speed up delivery, Tine said. The company paid
the extra cost of shipping flour from mills by truck instead
of the usual railcars. And King Arthur signed a contract with
a new distribution center to get grocery shelves restocked as
quickly as possible; it also negotiated a partnership with an
additional mill.
But no matter what company leaders did, it felt like they
were just plugging holes in a leaky bathtub. There simply
were not enough additional bagging lines at any of their
partners to fill the orders.
``As soon as a truckload of flour came in, it was sold that
next day,'' Tine said. Unlike toilet paper hoarding, he
pointed out, people were using all the flour they bought and
heading back for more: ``People were actually baking.''
To the surprise even of those in the flour business, it
turned out that the quarantine was compelling people to bake,
whether because they couldn't get out to buy their daily
loaf, they craved comfort food or they simply had a lot of
time on their hands. Suddenly, social media feeds were filled
with photos of pies, cakes, cookies and crusty loaves of
sourdough tagged #quarantinebaking.
Speaking Up
King Arthur's management team is well aware that there is
always room to do better. Last November, senior leadership
started ongoing diversity, equity and inclusion training. The
program was to be rolled out to the entire company, until the
pandemic put it on pause.
``We've got to be more proactive and more forward-looking
on how to make sure that we're actively getting all people to
our table,'' said Tine.
While women are well represented in management at King
Arthur, the company has very little racial diversity. ``We
live in a white state,'' said co-CEO Karen Colberg, quickly
adding, ``That doesn't absolve us from trying to talk about
[race], to raise awareness, to make change and to be in it.''
On June 1, King Arthur reacted to the protests sparked by
the police killing of George Floyd with a social media post
condemning ``the devastating racial injustices that continue
to plague our country'' and announcing a $200,000 fund to
support racial justice changemaking organizations.
This was a big step for a company whose potentially
controversial statements had previously been limited to ``Say
no to raw dough'' (due to the risk of E. coli in raw flour,
not salmonella in raw eggs).
Only a few hundred of the 39,0000-plus Facebook reactions
to the racial justice post were negative. The social media
team responded with a firm but empathic reiteration of the
company's position.
Social advocacy, Colberg acknowledged, ``is new for King
Arthur, and it's the right thing to do for us.'' The company
had been planning to launch a Pride Month campaign instead on
June 1 but decided to postpone it. Although some have accused
big consumer brands of jumping on the cause bandwagon, King
Arthur felt compelled to take a clear stand, she continued,
``not because of some expected payoff--though I do believe
people value it.''
To those who say King Arthur should stick to baking,
Colberg responds, ``If we can't speak to what is unfair . . .
then we are not being responsible leaders to our organization
and our society as a whole. There are so many injustices out
there and we have to do better.''
New Normal
At about 9:30 a.m. on Friday, June 12, the bread bakers at
King Arthur's Norwich headquarters were wrapping up their
shift that had started at 3:30 a.m. Masked and well spaced,
two bakers lifted rounds of dough, folding and shaping them
deftly.
On the pastry side, the scent of cinnamon was so strong it
seeped through the glass viewing windows and visitors'
mandatory masks.
During Vermont's ``Stay Home, Stay Safe'' period, the King
Arthur bakery continued to bake at reduced volume for local
customers. The retail store had just reopened with strict
safety guidelines. Jeanne Seymour had driven 70 miles from
Guilford as soon as she heard the news. Her basket was soon
full of baking tools and ingredients.
``I love that it's Vermont, that it's one of our
companies,'' she said, ``and that it's employee-owned.''
In a classroom, a pair of education center employees were
bagging loaves they'd baked for local community groups. The
tally had just reached 10,000 loaves donated during the
pandemic--15,000 including those baked at King Arthur's
Washington education center. Both locations are targeting
late July or early August to restart classes--albeit with
fewer students to ensure social distancing.
The Norwich complex fondly known as Camelot by King Arthur
employees is slowly moving back toward normal.
The question for King Arthur is what ``normal'' will look
like, at that facility and around the country. Baking usually
slows in the summertime, Tine said, but as of mid-June, sales
are up more than 50 percent compared to a year ago. ``I would
say that they're settling in, not settling down,'' he said.
``We're settling in to a new normal.''
The company feels confident it has developed systems to
respond to any future spike in demand. The challenge, Colberg
explained, is to figure out how to nurture the new interest
in baking hatched by the pandemic. ``How do we engage people
that have shown some interest in baking and keep them
baking?'' she pondered.
The bigger question, perhaps, is whether baking during the
pandemic has taught Americans anything.
``I think people like the tactile aspect of it: the
touching, the smelling, the feeling. We don't always engage
all of our senses in what we do,'' Furch of the Baker's
Hotline said. ``Baking also forces you to pay attention to
somebody else's rhythm, which is the rhythm of the dough. I
think people are learning patience.''
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