Wyndot Inc. may be the biggest company you've never heard of.
Nestled within a 250,000-square-foot plant in Marion, the company is a major player in the snack food industry. Only confidentiality agreements with its customers � retailers, like grocery stores, and brand-name snack food companies that contract with Wyandot � have prevented its name from spreading.
Hoover and Ava Brown founded the company in 1936 in an old Wyandot County schoolhouse, says Rex Parrott, the company's executive VP of operations. Wyandot Popcorn Company, which only sold un-popped popcorn, grew dramatically in the 1950s when a customer asked the company to expand into popped popcorn.
"And so they came to Marion, and rented some space and bought some poppers and started making popcorn-related snacks," Parrott says.
The company grew even more quickly in the 1960s when one of the founders' sons took over the snack portion of the business, Parrott says. Small chip makers, who didn't have the capabilities to make the all-corn products consumers demanded, flocked to Wyandot to fill their needs.
Today, the company makes nothing under its own name, but cranks out plenty of product for others � including the tortilla strips found on Southwestern Salads at Wendy's and McDonald's. The company will make about 50 million pounds of snacks this year, almost all of them corn based, Parrott says.
"About half of those are tortilla chips, and the other half are a variety of different products," Parrott says. "That equates to about 100 million bags of snacks. We handle about 140,000 cases of product every week and we handle either loading or unloading about 150 semis a week."
Wyandot is still family-owned and currently employs 350. It also has been hiring � about 30 new employees this year alone, Parrott says.
"Regardless of the economy, people still eat," he notes.
Source: Rex Parrott, Wyandot Foods
Writer: Gene Monteith