When Ken Brailsford was a boy, his grandpa drove him through Lehi, passing the town’s famous Lehi Roller Mills. One day, I want to own that, he thought, looking up at the three-story, white-and-red building and the silos nearby filled with thousands of bushels of wheat.

Brailsford hadn’t yet walked the steps inside the mill, worn down from decades of use by past workers. He didn’t know that students at neighboring Lehi High School would come out to their cars at the end of the school day to find them lightly dusted with flour. He didn’t know about the manual labor to work the flour packer that used to take four employees. He didn’t know about the millers who stayed with the company for decades after learning the trade of what it takes to produce high-quality flour.

He didn’t know the mill’s history. But once he grew up and ran KEB Enterprises, the company that would one day acquire the mill from the Robinson family, he learned.

Lehi Roller Mills has been a symbol for the town itself for more than 100 years. Along the way, it became an icon of American film thanks to its prominent appearance as a setting in the 1984 film Footloose.

In 1906, the community needed a new mill to replace a previous mill lost in a fire. Lehi Mill & Elevator Co. started as a co-op, funded by community members and local businesses. The mill produced its first sack of flour on April 2, 1906, powered by a 50-horsepower motor. The equipment in the mill included four sets of double rollers, one washer, two purifiers, two reels, a cleaner, dust roller, gyrator, separator and bran duster.

That year, the mill’s capacity was 70 bushels of wheat per day. It took only a couple of months to realize that the community demand was higher. Less than a year after opening, the mill added an elevator with a capacity of 10,000 bushels.

An ad ran in the Lehi Banner in 1907: “WANTED – 5000 bushels of wheat at
75¢ per bushel and any amount of barley at 85¢ per cwt.” That same year, the mill’s name changed to Lehi Roller Mills.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millers were transitioning from stone mills to roller mills, said Todd Berry, the mill’s current vice president of operations. By including “roller” in the mill’s name, the owners were letting everyone know they were using the very latest in milling technology.

In 1910, George Robinson purchased the mill from the co-op, beginning more than a century of mill ownership by the Robinson family. George focused on top-quality flour, much of it from partnerships with farmers in Cedar Valley, where they dry-farmed Turkey Red wheat.

The story goes that wheat from Turkey traveled over with immigrant farmers who planted it in Kansas. The heirloom, hard red winter wheat is prized as an excellent baking flour with rich flavors and good hardiness. The image of a turkey represents this flour heritage when the mill’s bread flour appears on store shelves. The mill kept with the bird representation for marketing for its all-purpose flour, choosing a peacock.

George passed the business on to his sons, Sherman and Raymond. They eventually passed it on to another generation with Sherm Robinson, who began his apprenticeship at 9 years old.

The flour from Lehi Roller Mills has a lot of history to live up to. Its present-day millers work hard to keep that reputation of quality.

When making flour from wheat, everything hinges on the quality of the wheat.

“You can’t make good-quality flour out of poor-quality wheat,” Berry said. To ensure the best quality, the mill only purchases wheat grown in the Rocky Mountains, where the growing conditions affect the taste and the functionality of the flour.

Once the wheat arrives, workers clean it, then temper it, adding the correct amount of moisture to the wheat kernels so the bran exterior can be separated easily. The key step is the milling process, in which opposing rollers gradually separate the bran from the flour. This prevents damaging the starch. After the wheat is broken up, it is sifted and separated according to particle size.

“These particles are then gradually milled down into smaller and smaller sizes until you have the perfect flour granulation,” Berry said.

When Sherm took over, he continued milling high-quality flour, but he also expanded the mill from selling flours to making and selling mixes – raspberry muffin is the best seller. Today, Lehi Roller Mills sells its flours and mixes under the shortened name Lehi Mills.

“Today, the word ‘roller’ doesn’t mean anything,” Berry said, “since all mills are now roller mills.”

Lehi Mills has an advantage over some mixing companies because its flour comes directly from the mill to the mixer, which means it doesn’t have to spend time debagging 50-pound bags of flour to get enough to put in the mixer – as much as 4,000 pounds. As a relatively small operation, Lehi Mills produces 2 million pounds of flour each month, of which 150,000 pounds goes into its mixes.

The mill kept up its quality over the years, but by 2012, the business was struggling. Financial setbacks included the end of a longtime partnership with KFC, whose parent company, Yum! Brands, forced the large Harman KFC restaurant franchise to purchase its ingredients from them, no longer purchasing from Lehi Mills.

Pete Harman, who teamed with Colonel Harland Sanders in 1952 to open the world’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Salt Lake City, used to purchase flour from the mill to mix with the 11 herbs and spices to bread the chicken. Lehi Roller Mills supplied the Harmans with flour all through KFC’s rise to international prominence and would eventually blend the 11 herbs and spices with the flour and package it into 25-pound bags.

In 2012, the same year the KFC-Lehi Roller Mills partnership ended, Ken Brailsford realized his boyhood dream when his KEB Enterprises purchased the mill. The investment wasn’t one where he simply wanted the real estate the mill stands on. He wanted to invest in the mill for generations more. As an example, Sherm Robinson stayed on because of his relationship with the farmers. Those partnerships are generations deep, and that’s part of what makes Lehi Mills’ flour premium.

The mill was renovated in 2019. It is recognized as a national historic landmark, and the community got nervous when the construction and painting began.

“We had a lot of people calling in a panic when we were doing that, thinking we were shutting it down,” KEB Enterprises Vice President Sheri Cutler said. “They wanted to know what we were doing to the mill, because it’s such a big part of the community.”

With a building standing for over 100 years, the history within its walls is generational. The mill has historical documents, such as some of the first flour purchases from 1906. The price of flour has been relatively stable for over 100 years. It wasn’t until the pandemic, when shoppers stocked up and left grocers’ shelves empty, that prices jumped dramatically.

The sudden increase in demand for flour impacted the small mill at that time, Cutler said. “We felt that pinch,” she said. “We had to limit how many bags we could sell to the public. Costco was begging us for more. It was stressful to keep up with the demand.”

The mill had to stop selling 25-pound bags directly to customers at the mill’s retail store, where flour sales initially spiked to more than 1,200 percent of average monthly sales. Flour products remained available at Costco, and the mill continued to supply bakeries, as well.

Lehi Mills’ biggest customers in Utah are Harmons and Kneaders. “Their bread that they make in their bakeries is our flour,” Lehi Mills General Manager Brock Knight said. The majority of Lehi Mills’ organic flour goes to bakeries on the West Coast, where demand for organic food is strongest.

Driving through Lehi today on Interstate 15, motorists see the silos painted with the iconic birds representing the mill’s premium flour products. The historic building sits on a busy intersection with fast-food franchises around it and new buildings popping up as part of the hotbed of tech companies known as Silicon Slopes.

However, people won’t see the halo that once graced Lehi Mills – the halo that helped the mill make its highly memorable appearance on the silver screen in the movie Footloose.

Back in the 1980s, before the mill put in the advanced filtration system it has today, flour dust floated above the mill at night. A movie producer happened to drive by the mill at dusk, when the flour dust above the buildings caught the light and put a halo over the mill. “He thought it was so iconic that he came in to talk to Sherm,” Knight said. He told him he wanted to make a movie there one day.

Lehi provided the ideal backdrop for the movie about a small town and a newcomer, played by Kevin Bacon, who moves there from the big city. The mill and the prairie land of Lehi set the stage for the story of young against old, where dancing and rock music weren’t allowed, but the high school kids planned a prom at the grain mill just outside the town limits. A mill with a halo seemed just the right spot for high school kids defiantly dancing at their prom.

The color of the mill’s roof has changed since its 1984 turn on the big screen, and a new building has gone up behind the main one, but Lehi Roller Mills otherwise looks the same as it did in Footloose, if not better. As the city grows around it, the mill remains its steadfast icon.