2221 Front Street
Many take this mill for granted when they admire Toledo's Maumee riverfront from downtown. Maybe these facts will change how they view it in the future.
Soft wheat flour milling at this Front Street site dates back to 1892. The National Biscuit Co. (NABISCO) bought the operation in 1926, and the current facility was built in 1976.
This operation is the second-largest soft wheat flour mill in the United States and one of the largest flour mills in the world.
The six-story, 61,000-square-foot mill processes more than 80 percent of all the flour used by NABISCO and Kraft, which merged in 2000 to become one of the country's largest food manufacturers. In 2008, the companies split, the NABISCO name was dropped, and Kraft's snack food line was renamed Mondelez International.
According to Mondelez, the mill is the largest dedicated soft wheat mill in North America and has a storage capacity of 5.5 million bushels of wheat. It processes over 1,500 tons of flour on an average day. The flour is shipped to Mondelez bakeries across North America to make snacks, including Oreo and Chips Ahoy! cookies and Ritz crackers.
So, how important is this facility? In 2014, the mill was shut down for a week after a train derailment knocked out power to the facility. Since the mill is a significant source of mill feed, a byproduct of the flour milling process widely used in livestock feed, acute shortages of mill feed were reported in a variety of locations, and spot prices trended sharply higher until the mill was put back into production.