MiMfg Magazine
INDUSTRY
18
December 2019
Member
Spotlight
Mark Flegenheimer
Michigan Sugar Company
Member since May 2018 • Employs 930 (+1,100 seasonal) workers • Learn more at www.michigansugar.com
Do you know how important agriculture is to
Michigan’s manufacturing success?
Thanks to an abundant rainfall and exceptional
soils, Michigan ranks as the nation’s second most
diverse agriculture producer. Whether it’s dairy
and beef, wheat and cucumbers or Christmas trees
and flowers, you can find most everything on family
farms scattered across the Great Lakes State.
Agriculture businesses take what they’ve grown
and convert it into products found on grocery
shelves and on dinner tables. This includes Bay
City’s own Michigan Sugar Company; converting
nearly 5 million tons of sugar beets into more than
1.3 billion pounds of sugar annually.
“I think it’s really neat that we start with a seed
and end up with a product on the shelf,” Michigan
Sugar President Mark Flegenheimer. “We don’t
‘make’ sugar, Mother Nature does; we just extract
it from the beet. Other industries are important,
but there’s an added specialty and wonderment in
industries that do what we do.”
As a part of Michigan’s history since 1906,
Flegenheimer still sees Michigan Sugar and
Michigan’s agricultural success as stories untold.
Today, Michigan Sugar Company — producers
of Pioneer Sugar and Big Chief Sugar — is the only
remaining sugar company in the state and the third
largest in America. The grower-owned cooperative
generates nearly a half billion dollars in direct
economic activity annually in the local communities
in which it operates. The company’s combined
factories have a beet slicing capacity of 22,000 tons
per day and each year more than 125,000 truckloads
of beets traverse Michigan’s roads and highways.
“
You shouldn’t try and do everything —
understand who you are and what
things you can do better than the rest,
then focus on those.
”
— Mark Flegenheimer
“We’re locally grown and locally owned and
we want people to come see what we do,” said
Flegenheimer, noting public tours of the company’s
Bay City factory are offered each year from September
to February. “Walking through our facilities is
always exciting for me — you can watch a sugar
beet just pulled from the ground become glistening
white sugar.”
But the process isn’t easy, and the costs can be
high, so Michigan Sugar is always looking for
ways to reduce costs and improve the process.
“Going from sugar beet to the store shelf is
incredibly energy intensive,” explained Flegenheimer.
“About 80 percent of a sugar beet is water so
there’s a lot of evaporation that has to happen as
we work to extract the sugar. Over the last 10 to
15 years, we’ve worked to find better ways to
improve efficiencies and fuse new technologies
with proven processes. By doing that, we’ve been
able to reduce energy consumption by one-third
— that’s huge considering energy is our
largest cost after labor.”
Manufacturers that are looking to
reduce costs and hit their future goals
would be smart to mimic the lessons
learned by Flegenheimer and his team.
“You shouldn’t try and do everything —
understand who you are and what things
you can do better than the rest, then focus
on those,” Flegenheimer offered. “Don’t
sacrifice on safety. Keep that front of mind
and make sure your team is watching out for
each other. And, most important, be out
there telling your story to the community, to
Michigan Sugar Company’s Flegenheimer (second from right), joins young people looking for career paths and
Saginaw County leaders at the February 2018 groundbreaking of a
to elected officials who may not know what
$1 million liquid livestock feed plant in Carrolton Township. The plant it is your team brings to their community.”
blends molasses from Michigan Sugar into liquid livestock feed sold
to producers throughout the state.
6
Photos courtesy of Michigan Sugar Company