Bon Appetit! Watco Transports Pizza’s Main Ingredient

A pizza isn’t complete without a crust. It’s what holds the sauce, cheese, and toppings of your choice together. And believe it or not, it’s brought to you by Watco.

Watco’s Kansas & Oklahoma Railroad (KO) transports wheat for co-op customers to the Wichita Terminal Association (WTA). From there, the WTA delivers wheat to mills in Wichita to be made into flour. As flour, it’s sent to locations across the country via truck and rail. One of those mills ships flour to the KO’s sister railroad, the Grand Elk Railroad (GDLK).

Once the flour is handed off to the GDLK at Elkhart, Indiana, it rides the rails to Grand Rapids, Michigan. More than 54 million pounds of flour makes the trip each year, with each railcar holding an average 219,000 pounds of flour.

Once the flour arrives at the customer location in Grand Rapids, it’s unloaded, and delivered to a local baking company where they not only make pizza dough from the flour, but prepare individual pizzas to be distributed by a major pizza chain.

From grain to flour, flour to pizza crust, and pizza crust to pizza being delivered to your front door, Watco’s railroads are proud to work as a team to play a part in providing Americans with one of their all-time favorite foods.