Milling & Baking News - December 13, 2011 - 22

Signature Interview 

In Stoufer’s view, ‘sky is the limit’ for whole wheat ﬂour potential
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current share of 5%). You can make a very strong case for that. It’s not multiple generations until you get there. It’s the next 20 years. “We’re beyond the point of perception that whole grains taste bad. Going forward, if you win the kids, you’ve won the entire race. You’ve won an entire generation. There is a lot of effort there, in lunch programs for example. All the things they are doing toward greater whole grains inclusion is exactly the right thing to do.” Like his predecessor, who was promoted to president of Commercial Foods at ConAgra Foods, Mr. Stoufer comes to his current position with long tenure in the company’s milling business. During this period, Mr. Stoufer

Paul T. Maass, left, president of the Commercial Foods division of ConAgra Foods, Inc., and Bill Stoufer, right, president of ConAgra Mills.

said he has seen many changes in milling, overwhelmingly for the good. In particular, professionalism in ﬂour milling has reached an entirely new level over the course of his career, he said. “It’s a whole different ballgame from ﬁve years ago,” he said. “The market dynamics, sophistication, professionalism. The dialogue with customers is different. It’s better. It’s less transactional. We’re both ﬁghting the same headwinds, and we have to ﬁnd a way to win together. “We discuss questions like ‘What are you doing with people?’, or ‘with
22 / December 13, 2011 Milling & Baking News

transportation, with food safety? It’s a shared responsibility. It’s exciting. There always will be transactional business. But there is a shared understanding of mission. Take food safety. You can’t do it alone as a milling company, and our customers can’t do it alone as a bakery.” Mr. Stoufer will mark his 21st anniversary with ConAgra Foods in January. His experience in the milling business has been quite varied, beginning with an assignment in the transportation department and then work with logistics. He said an ambition to advance in the company prompted his initial move outside of transportation. “The gentleman in front of me running transportation was only a few years older than I was,” he said. “You are young and dumb, and so I asked, ‘What am I going to do with my career?’ I decided to try something different and jumped into sales. I began selling in Ohio and was ready to move there. But that was the year ConAgra Mills decided the market was shifting, and the customer wants you at your desk instead of shaking their hand. So I became the test pilot for our centralizing most of the sales staff right here in Omaha. I had success and worked my way up.” After a stint at Spicetec Flavors & Seasonings and the now divested Gilroy Foods divisions of Commercial Foods, Mr. Stoufer returned to sales at ConAgra Mills, dividing overall sales responsibilities with Don Brown, vicepresident of sales. “Don and I split the sales staff,” he said. “He had national accounts, and I had regional sales people.” When Mr. Maass was named general manager of ConAgra Mills in 2003, the division became a more focused business, Mr. Stoufer said. He said greater alignment was needed between sales and operations. “We could sell something, but could we execute for the customer?” Mr. Stoufer said. “We could make something but could we sell it? “I came out of sales to run supply chain management. It really came down to a question of, ‘How do we run our internal business better for our customers? Questions were centered not around running operations better but running operations in a coordinated manner. There was give and take. Sometimes you

have to do something for the company that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes you can’t. It was about managing our capacity better, managing our selling better, managing a lot of things. Running this business more efﬁciently. “Our customers ended up seeing a better ConAgra Mills. It was a testament to the work everyone did, the entire team.” Whether by happenstance or design, the broad range of experiences in Mr. Stoufer’s career prepared him for his current assignment and also suited his character, he said. “It was a lot of different roles and shaped how I think about things,” he said. “From a personality side, I’m a restless person. I enjoy a certain amount of change, thinking of better ways we can run our business or execute for our customer. That ﬁt my role in supply chain and it ﬁts today, because our environment is in such a period of change. How do we succeed for our customers in this environment? I love that as much as anything right now.” Mr. Stoufer was quick to draw a distinction between change for the sake of change, which he called counterproductive, and efforts to create value for customers. As an example, he cited the company’s SafeGuard Ready-To-Eat ﬂour, an integrated system of milling, heat treatment, storage and transportation aimed, according to ConAgra Mills, at “improving ﬂour safety without sacriﬁcing crucial ﬂour functionality.” “In instances where there may not be a validated process that reduces the microbial load, it’s a tremendous win for the customer, knowing that SafeGuard ﬂour will provide their product with an extra layer of food safety,” Mr. Stoufer said. The SafeGuard line and Ultragrain whole wheat ﬂour hardly represent ConAgra Mills’ only efforts at innovation in milling. Mr. Stoufer was upbeat about prospects for Sustagrain, the company’s proprietary high-ﬁber waxy barley. Since its introduction in 2004, demand for Sustagrain has grown, albeit slowly, he said. “You’re beginning to see people accepting natural sources of ﬁber, hot cereals continuing the trend of coming
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