Merger of flour millers would create a giant company with about a third of the national market

"Some of the biggest players in the flour milling industry are joining forces to make the country’s largest miller even larger," Luke Runyon reports for Harvest Public Media. "The biggest flour miller in the U.S., Horizon Milling, which is jointly owned by privately held Cargill and the agricultural cooperative CHS, proposed earlier this year a merger with the milling arm of food giant ConAgra. The new company would be called Ardent Mills."

The new firm would be twice the size of its next largest competitor "and control roughly a third of the country’s flour milling market," Runyon reports. "That could mean lower prices for farmers and higher prices for consumers, according to advocates for both groups." Now the top three milling companies have nearly equal market shares, about a sixth of the market. The merger is undergoing an anti-trust review by the Department of Justice. (Read more)