Pillsbury

Charles A. Pillsbury (1842–1899) bought one-third of the Minneapolis Flour Milling Company in 1869. By the early 1870s, using modernized equipment to process the local spring wheat at several mills, his company was producing two thousand barrels of flour a day. Renamed C. A. Pillsbury and Company in 1872, it adopted the trademark “Pillsbury’s Best XXXX” (the four Xs constituting a medieval symbol for top quality).

Pillsbury installed “middlings purifiers” in 1871, implementing a process developed at the Washburn Mills (later to become General Mills) that removed dark specks of hull, producing whiter flour. In the mid-1870s, Pillsbury began using a Hungarian innovation that he saw on a visit to Europe, involving sets of iron and porcelain steamrollers that crushed and disintegrated the wheat, replacing traditional millstones; all of the bran and wheat germ was removed, producing an even whiter and longer-lasting flour and boosting production by 3 percent. Pillsbury’s brother sold the leftover bran as animal feed.