There are a lot of numbers that showcase just how much flour comes out of the Hastings Ardent Mill.
The mill’s main line can produce a pallet of 50 50-pound bags of flour every two minutes, which is about the weight of a Toyota Corolla.
Forty semi-trucks leave the plant daily carrying about 50,000 pounds of flour each.
Overall, the Hastings Ardent Mill produces about 2.7 million pounds of flour a day.
It is hard to picture that amount of anything, especially something so literally granular as flour, so for Assistant Plant Manager Nicolas Malnarcic, the metric is pizzas.
“When you start thinking about the volume of what we’re putting out and what like a small local pizza place would use, that’s a ton of flour,” said Malnarcic.
Malnarcic estimates the mill produces enough flour to make “about four million pizzas a day.”
Assuming each pizza is 14 inches in diameter (the size of a Domino’s large pizza, which uses flour from Ardent mills), if placed end-to-end, the line of pizzas would stretch more than 833 miles, which is about twice the total length of Minnesota.
That enormous amount of flour coming out of Hastings is sent to several different places. Flour goes to distribution sites that go on to stock shelves in big-box stores like Walmart; they also sell to other businesses wholesale. Hastings Ardent Mills’ customers include chains like Popeye’s, Domino’s, and Kraft foods.
All this from just 130 workers.

Operations
The Hastings Ardent Mill is one of the largest mills in the country. It features five milling units, two of which almost solely make white flour, and four pack lines which supply both bulk rail cars and semi-trucks.
Unlike many other mills, the Hastings Ardent Mill produces several different types of flour.
“We probably have the largest range of products that we make amongst the network,” said Malnarcic.
Different types of flour comes from different types of wheat and how the wheat is milled to precise mixtures of both.
But what exactly occurs during the milling process?
First is transportation. Different kinds of wheat come from surrounding states and Canadian provinces from the Dakotas to Nebraska and Illinois to Saskatchewan to right here in Minnesota. Because of the number of different types of flour made at the mill, different types of wheat grown in different regions are required.
Once at the mill, brought by an army of trucks and trains, wheat is pulled up into grain silos where it is separated, aspirated, scoured, tempered, purified and milled, running up and down the tower of stacked floors of machinery, as many as 10 times depending on the type of flour, said Malnarcic.
The Hastings mill’s five milling units range from fully automated to dating back to the 1970s that still relies on operators to “use their nose or sense of feel, for smelling any off odors, or touching something to realize its hot,” said Plant Manager Ryan Baker.
Beyond simply whole wheat or white flour, some of the different types of flour produced at the Hastings Ardent Mill include flour specific to certain brands and iconic products.
One example is the flour that goes into making the macaroni of Kraft Mac and Cheese. To make specific flours like that, mill operators use recipes that detail percentages of types of flours that need to be blended.
“We’re probably one of the few mills that is able to make that for them,” said Malnarcic.
Once the final product is finished, it is packaged across the four pack lines and shipped, via railcar—which runs directly through the mill and must be passed beneath to get to the offices—or semi-truck.

History
From the insides of the mill’s offices, the timbers and beams of the old control room can be seen, complete with cuts and notches made to move equipment in and out.
“There’s history on every beam in this facility,” said Baker.
They speak to the 120-year history of the facility, which is still in operation today.
What is now the Hastings Ardent Mill was built in 1853 by Harrison H. Graham. The mill featured “two runs of stones being 4-4.5 feet in diameter,” according to the 1881 edition of the Dakota County North Star Publishing.
The founding of the mill predates the city of Hastings by four years and marks the Hastings Mill as the “oldest mill still in operation of all the mills that have kind of popped up in Minnesota,” said Baker.
Graham’s initial land claim for the mill was challenged and in exchange for half the share of the mill, General Willaim G. LeDuc worked with Graham to settle the dispute.
Graham would sell the rest of his claim to the mill to LeDuc just three years later in 1856 for $7,000—roughly $270,000 in today’s dollars.
LeDuc would then sell the mill in 1860 to the Harrison brothers of Illinois who after the death of one of the brothers would again sell the mill in 1863 to Stephen Gardner.
Gardner would expand the mill from its original footprint and is credited with inventing aerating middlings, which separate the lighter bran from the heavier middlings, which then go on to make flour. A version of this aeration process is still used today.
The aeration process was so successful, in fact, that the Vermillion brand of flour was sold at higher prices than that from Minneapolis. A barrel of Vermillion flour sold for $1 more than flour from Minneapolis, roughly $25 more per barrel today.
The mill used so many barrels, it had its own cooper’s shop which is noted for employing more workers than the mill itself at times.
Over the years, the Hastings mill has been the origin of several now-industry-standard innovations within the milling industry, even beyond the aeration process.
For example, the use of magnets to remove metal from wheat started in Hastings. This practice not only protected equipment within the mill but prevented grain dust explosions that were common and deadly due to the explosive nature of grain dust.
Another major shift was the use of roll stands instead of mill stones. Rather than have stone wheels grind wheat, using opposed wheels that crush wheat as it falls through provides more precision and prevents bits of rock from contaminating the wheat.
“This mill was the first mill to make the leap of 100% roll stand,” said Baker.
This change to roll stands occurred under the ownership of Charles Espenschied, who took over ownership of the mill in 1885 after he married Gardner’s granddaughter Achsah.
Over the course of the next century, the Hastings mill would continue to grow and produce an increasing number of different types of flour. AXA (an abbreviation of Achsah’s name) and King Midas brands of flour were both popular brands made and sold from the mill.
In 1903, a union was organized by workers of the mill. “Their primary objective was the adoption of the eight-hour day system,” according to the retrospective.
In 1928, the then-owners of the mill died within a month of each other and the mill was sold to the Peavy Company.
During the Great Depression, the mill ran on a break-even basis. The mill had been struggling since the end of the first World War when the government price supports for grain and flour ended and the mill was stuck with too much inventory.
The mill gradually shifted away from hydropower in the decades between 1940-1980. The site no longer uses any hydropower from the Vermillion River.
“The amount of power we use, this wouldn’t be able to supply. Maybe the lights,” said Malnarcic.
In 1976, three-quarters of the mill was reconstructed due to increasing regulatory requirements. According to the retrospective, an estimated 100,000 square feet of building space was added with no down time for the mill.
In 2014 Arden Mills bought the mill and has operated it in the decade since.

The future
Baker is open that fully automating milling units is the future goal for the mill, because of the benefits to safety and consistency. Those upgrades however, come with new requirements for maintenance which is why even as milling units have become automated, the number of jobs at the facility has “been consistent for the last few decades,” said Malnarcic.
According to a 1981 Dakota County Historical Society retrospective on the site, staffing levels at that time were at 180 workers, 50 more than Malnarcic estimated work there in 2026.
In recent years, there has been a shift in staff, with a wave of retirements and hirings as the old guard left. That string of retirements came just before the COVID-19 Pandemic, which “was a rough turnover period for us,” said Malnarcic.
This shift has left the workforce at the mill very young. Malnarcic estimates that 70% of the maintenance department is 30 and younger. As more jobs shift from mill operators to maintenance this trend shows little sign of slowing.
Baker provided a final figure to conceptualize the output of the Hastings mill and those owned by Ardent: “Ardent Mills produces about 1/3 of the flour products in the United States.”
From Kraft Mac and Cheese to bread to pasta, to, yes especially pizza, mills play a massive role in residents’ diets.
Some of it comes right from the piece of living history that’s perched on the banks of the Vermillion River.