[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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