Logo for the Wheat Marketing Center featuring stylized red wheat stalks forming part of the letter W, with WHEAT MARKETING CENTER written in red capital letters below.
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Wheat Innovation Lab

In our Innovation Lab we evaluate new ingredients, formulations and processes on a small scale, under the highest standards of quality control. Through the generous support of our state wheat commissions, Wheat Marketing Center is home to three major pilot scale production lines.

 With our Innovation Lab designed specifically to serve the wheat-based food industry, our pilot lines include an Asian Noodle Line, Cracker/Biscuit Line, and a Tortilla Line to enhance our research, product development and technical training capability around these end products.

Asian Noodle Line

The Asian Noodle Line includes a vacuum mixer, dough sheeters, a series of rollers, slitter, steamer, fryer and dryer.  This line helps us evaluate things like noodle strength, cohesiveness, and sensory in order to create noodles for a variety of applications.  Click here to watch a short vide on the noodle-making process.

A woman in a white lab coat and blue gloves uses scissors to cut noodle strands beside a conveyor belt in a food processing facility. Noodles are visible on the belt, and international flags hang in the background.
Rows of rectangular crackers with small holes move along a metal conveyor belt during a food production process.

Cracker/Biscuit Line

The Cracker/Biscuit Line at Wheat Marketing Center is one of only two in the entire world!  It can be adapted to many types of products, including saltine crackers, snack crackers, Mari-style semi-sweet biscuits, and various types of rotary cookies.  Click here to watch a short video on the cracker-making process.

Tortilla Line

The Tortilla Line enables Wheat Marketing Center to build on its extensive research to help improve whole wheat tortilla quality domestically and globally.  This line assists bakers in solving real, everyday challenges like textural quality and spoilage rate.  Click here to watch a short video on the tortilla-making process.

A person in a lab coat and blue gloves holds a tray lined with parchment paper and several pieces of flatbread or tortillas.

These pilot scale production lines make the Wheat Marketing Center a unique research and training facility.  Here are just a few ways our production lines serve the wheat industry:

  • Technical Training – course participants gain valuable hands-on experience testing  flour blends, ingredients and manufacturing processes and then evaluating the results for optimal results.
  • Wheat growers can see (and taste!) end products made with their wheat and understand how the quality of their wheat affects products around the world.  
  • Private companies working with our subsidiary WMC Lab Services can utilize the pilot scale lines to develop new products and processes without having to interrupt commercial production.  The ability to make and evaluate end products is critical to our research projects, both public and proprietary.

Contact Us to Learn More

To learn more about our pilot production lines or how you can work with Wheat Marketing Center, please contact our Technical Director, Dr. Jayne Bock, at jbock@wmcinc.org or 503-295-0823.