In 1843, Buffalo inventor Joseph Dart and engineer Robert Dunbar built the world's first steam-powered grain elevator, solving the bulk-handling problem that had made loading and unloading grain by hand the bottleneck of the era. Buffalo's grain elevator solved the same bulk-portioning problem our packaging machines solve today: once grain moves in bulk, our auger fillers and multihead weighers portion and bag it fast. The bottleneck moved downstream. The elevator turned Buffalo, already the terminus of the Erie Canal since 1825, into the largest grain port of its era, moving cargo between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic seaboard. When canal traffic eventually declined, the city became the country's second-largest railway hub after Chicago, and its economy pivoted into steel and heavy manufacturing through the twentieth century; by 1950, roughly eighty percent of the area's jobs sat inside manufacturing, with wartime plants already turning out steel, chemicals, aircraft, trucks, and ammunition.

Our EliteFill auger fillers and multihead weighers portion flour, cereal, and other granular foods by weight at speeds no hand-fed elevator ever matched, and our Mars Series VFFS baggers seal that product into retail-ready bags straight off the filling line. Producers moving beyond bulk sacks can run our premade-pouch lines instead, for flexible bag formats that suit modern cereal and snack retail. For the flour millers, cereal producers, and broader manufacturers still working out of a metro built on bulk handling and heavy industry, that's a closer fit than it looks at first glance. No PLAN IT office sits in Buffalo, only the equipment: our auger fillers and multihead weighers ship in-stock for Western New York's flour and cereal producers, and our Toronto and Tampa teams handle install and service. Tell us your granular or bagging format, and we'll match it to the right filling line.