The taste of innovation

By Jennifer M. Latzke

They're the staple snacks at ball games and on road trips. If you've partaken the tasty treat of in-shell sunflower seeds recently, there's a 50 percent chance you've tasted the fruits of the labor of sunflower growers from the southern growing region of the United States--from Nebraska south to Texas.

Now, with the recent development of a new confectionery processing plant in Lubbock, Texas, SunGold Foods, a business unit of Red River Commodities, Inc., is poised to ensure a lot more of those sunflower seeds come from Texas growers.

For decades Red River Commodities and SunGold have worked to bring innovation to every process of the sunflower production cycle. From the seeds the growers plant, to the engineering behind new processing equipment, to looking to the future needs of sunflower growers, the key to their success is innovative ideas. This is how SunGold delivers a consistent product to consumers each time they reach their hand in a bag of seeds at a ball game, or puts out bird food in their backyard feeders.

"We acquired a facility in Colby, Kan., in the early 1990s," explained Mike Williams, general manager of Southern Procurement for SunGold. At the time Red River was looking to expand sunflower acreage outside of the Dakotas to avoid disease issues that were cropping up. In the mid-90s, Red River's sunflower expansion reached into Lubbock with a birdseed production plant, and then the acquisition of L&W Sunflower.

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