The Trip to Honeyville

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A love for food and a passion for innovative product solutions make Honeyville a major destination for fresh ingredients and a full suite of supply chain services.

There’s something about the relentless rush of progress that sparks an equal and opposite desire for comfort and simplicity, especially when it comes to food. Perhaps we long for a taste of a great-granny’s signature cookie, or for a slice of bread from a childhood bakery. For many of us, the words “family” and “farm” conjure memories of a time when our food could be traced to the source and trusted to be nutritious and whole.

For family-owned Honeyville, Inc. of Ogden, Utah, that trust has never wavered. For over 60 years, the Sherratt family has dedicated themselves to delivering the highest-quality baking ingredients straight from the field. The Honeyville mission is deceptively simple: improve the way the world eats. The organization has done this for decades by creating innovative grain milling processes, empowering food industry entrepreneurs with their Turnkey Supply Chain, and launching its own brands of consumer products.

In the 1950s, rancher and wheat farmer Lowell Sherratt Sr. was looking for new opportunities. When he learned that a large company needed cracked wheat, he built a grain cracker with his own hands and turned that need into the engine for a thriving enterprise.

And thrive, it did. As the demand for Honeyville’s problem-solving attitude grew, so did the need for capacity, and, after a couple of moves, Sherratt found an old mill in Honeyville, Utah. He transformed the rundown property into a state-of-the-art milling operation and Honeyville, Inc. was born.

Today, Honeyville has manufacturing and distribution facilities in Utah, California, and Arizona. In 2017, the firm debuted a cutting-edge 200,000 square foot facility in Ogden, designed to improve efficiencies, consolidate its Utah distribution facility, and bring its HQ together with the workforce.

Honeyville cleans, cracks, rolls, mills, and blends whole grains and provides comprehensive private label services, as well as mixing and blending, product formulation, and distribution services.

Back to Basics, Ahead of the Curve

In a world filled with artificials and synthetics, consumers are becoming more ingredient-savvy and demanding more natural, simple food options. They also want transparency.

“There is a movement among consumers to get back to the basics, especially with their food,” said Nathan Hyde, Honeyville COO. “They want to understand where their food is coming from and see that there are fewer processing or supply chain steps between them and their food.”

That return to simplicity is especially evident in Honeyville’s supply chain.

“Because we are vertically integrated, we often bring grains straight from the farm and have them in our possession all the way to the finished product,” Hyde explained. “This is great for our manufacturing customers and provides increased visibility to the end consumer.”

Some of the processes running at the new Ogden facility are designed especially for the co-packing market segment, an area of the company’s business that is booming. For manufacturers like Honeyville, co-packing presents a significant competitive advantage, helping the company make the fullest use of its grain milling expertise, talent, and equipment while shortening the supply chain and the lead time to the end consumer.

“We saw the entrepreneurial energy in the food industry and knew we could help these young companies bring their exciting new products to market,” noted Hyde. “We’ve developed expertise in procurement, manufacturing, and order fulfillment over the last several decades and saw the opportunity to offer this suite of services to companies who need that kind of support.”

This Turnkey Supply Chain, as it’s known, lets the brand’s management focus on marketing and sales while Honeyville manages the supply chain from formulation to fulfillment.

Honeyville’s co-packing focuses on blending bakery mixes, drink mixes, and a host of other dry food products. The new Ogden plant features several blending lines as well as a variety of packaging technologies.

For Honeyville, support matters.

“Several times a year we have customers approach us with difficult and complex projects that other co-packers aren’t willing to take on,” Hyde revealed. “We strive to be the partner that finds innovative, cost-effective solutions for our customers. This has been one of the driving principles Lowell has woven into the fabric of the company over the last 50 years.”

Ingenuity, Handled with Care

Another innovative solution pioneered at Honeyville is their proprietary food safety process called TempSURE®.  The idea was born in the minds of two company leaders, Bruce Merrell and Don Mann, when they noticed a need to reduce the microbial pathogens found in grain products. But they didn’t want to use the common chemical treatments that were prevalent at the time.

The spate of illnesses from the consumption of raw cookie-dough in 2009 added urgency to Merrell and Mann’s prescient idea. The two put together a plan and “convinced then-president Lowell Sherratt Jr. to invest in the idea, then our talented maintenance group designed and built the chamber in-house.”

The latest iteration of the TempSURE process utilizes a high-tech chamber that closely monitors heat to act as a kill step in reducing or eliminating harmful levels of bacteria in dry food ingredients. The process requires neither radiation nor chemical fumigants, enabling organic, gluten free, and non-GMO products to be ready-to-eat. Products go through the process in their original packaging, eliminating bacteria in the packaging as well as in the product.

Along with offering safer food options to the food industry, Honeyville has recently launched a consumer-packaged heat-treated flour under its new Page House™ brand.

“We believe individual consumers should have access to the same safe ingredients that large food companies do,” Hyde declared. “Our deepest satisfaction comes from solving the issues facing our customers and the food industry,” he said.

Honeyville’s long history of ingenuity and people-focused principles have created a dynamic, customer-centric organization. They probably have a solution to solve your current dilemma but if they don’t, they’ll build one.