A few minutes ago I was at a rather absurdly named intersection. I was at the corner of Betty Crocker and General Mills.
Here’s some photographic proof:
It’s not as absurd when you realize that I’ve been driving around the green, leafy campus of General Mills, the giant food corporation that processes so much of the prairie oats crop. I’m in Minneapolis, on my annual pilgrimage to the World Pork Expo in Des Moines, Iowa, and I always stop while passing through the Twin Cities to check out Oat City. Minneapolis truly is the home of oats. At least as far as cities go. The Canadian prairies are home to where they’re grown, but it’s here, around Minneapolis, where there’s the greatest collection of oats-processing concerns.
I must say the General Mills folks have built themselves a nice campus here. Wow. It’s like a really, really nice university campus. Nicer than the leafy lawns I used to tread at the University of Western Ontario. And I haven’t noticed much scent of breakfast cereal. Where oh where is the Green Giant? Where is the Pillsbury Doughboy? Where’s Betty? They’ve gotten them all hidden away somewhere on this sprawling estate, probably chowing down on Cheerios. (General Mills owns all those brands I just mentioned.)
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Last year while in Minneapolis I visited with the folks at Grain Millers, who have quietly become major players in milling and processing Canadian oats. Minneapolis is also the home of Whitebox, the hedge fund that bought up a lot of old grain elevators in the U.S. Midwest and used them to store oats in the delivery area of the Chicago Board of Trade oats futures contract, fulfilling a role that had been missing. Recently that ownership has changed, but I’m too frazzled from spending the last hour in Minneapolis construction season freeway traffic to be able to explain the financial changes in any sort of a way that would make sense to a human being.
When I get to Des Moines I’ll be two hours west of what some claim is the biggest oats processor in North America: the Quaker plant at Cedar Rapids. Apparently whether or not this is actually the biggest plant is an item of some industry contention, depending on what measures one uses, so that’s why I said “some claim.” Regardless, it’s a big consumer of Canadian oats too.
And off to the west of Des Moines, at South Sioux City. Nebraska, is the 21st Century Grain Processing oats plant that Viterra has just made a deal to buy, that I hear has unique processing abilities and produces unique, value-added oats products. After the pork expo I’m going to wend my way west through South Sioux City so I can take a look at it, at least from the fenceline. I’m hoping to find out a bit more about what exactly gets done in that plant that makes some analysts excited about it.
So, from near the corner of Betty Crocker and General Mills a river of oats importance proceeds, and I’m about to travel into the heart of this great oaty darkness. Wish I had a horse. I’d name it Mistah Kurtz.
