When you open a little blue box of Jiffy Mix, you’re not just tearing into a pouch of baking mix—you’re tapping into a tradition that stretches back generations. Whether it’s memories of mom letting you stir the cornbread mix or secretly picking out the little blueberries from the muffin mix, for many, that blue box is as iconic as the many family moments it has fueled in kitchens across America.
Maintaining that heritage while preparing for the future is no small task. Chelsea Milling Company, the family-owned business behind Jiffy Mix, faced a critical challenge: modernizing its packaging lines to keep up with growth while ensuring the brand experience stayed exactly the same.
At the center of that journey was our company, Spee-Dee Packaging Machinery, a fellow Midwestern, family-owned company whose fillers and checkweighers played a pivotal role in Chelsea Milling’s multi-year packaging modernization project.
A Relationship Built on Trust and Partnership
The relationship between Chelsea Milling and Spee-Dee goes back more than 15 years. When Chelsea Milling, a Chelsea, MI-based company, expanded into five-pound foodservice bags, it needed equipment capable of handling Jiffy’s unique product characteristics—an unusual mix with challenging flow properties that didn’t behave like standard flour or grains.
Since we’re based near Milwaukee, WI, a reasonable drive to and from Chelsea, Michigan, we were a natural partner. The companies’ proximity made collaboration easier, and both shared the values of heritage, reliability, and family ownership.
“We made more than a few trips over there with cases and sacks of mix and all kinds of different tooling ideas to test equipment ahead of time,” recalls Justin Hubbard, Senior Project Engineer at Chelsea Milling. “That way, we really knew what type of results we were going to get before ever entering into a full equipment purchase.”
Those early days in our Test Lab laid the foundation for a partnership that would later expand into Chelsea Milling’s massive packaging modernization effort—an overhaul that has touched every bag and box of Jiffy Mix leaving the company’s Chelsea, Michigan plant.
The Challenge: Modernizing Without Compromising Tradition
Jiffy Mix isn’t a standard powder. Its sugar and fat content, along with its compressibility, make it notoriously difficult to handle consistently. As Chelsea Milling planned its new bag-in-box packaging lines, it needed filling and weighing systems that could dose the product precisely, day in and day out, under all conditions.
“The mix presents a lot of challenges in how it compresses and how it can change density inside packaging equipment,” Hubbard explains. “We needed to find a solution that didn’t just work on the good days. It absolutely had to be able to handle an entire year’s worth of circumstances. We never want to make excuses for why something isn’t running.”
The stakes were high. This was the only production plant in the world that makes Jiffy Mix, and millions of households depended on the product’s consistency. For Chelsea Milling, there was no room for compromise on quality.
Digital Laser Sensors and Split Hoppers for Maximum Control
Our split hopper auger fillers became the backbone of the modernization project. Through extensive testing, both companies worked hand-in-hand to customize fillers that could handle Jiffy’s complex material properties.
Several innovations emerged from this collaboration:
Traditional fillers relied on physical probes to measure product levels inside the hopper. While effective for many products, probes failed with Jiffy Mix.
Working with our engineers, Chelsea Milling helped pioneer the use of digital laser distance sensors, later enhanced with analog functions, to provide real-time hopper level control straight from the HMI. Operators could monitor and adjust the system with precision, ensuring consistent weights.
Custom Agitators
Together, we discovered that both slow-speed and high-speed agitators were essential to keeping Jiffy Mix flowing properly. But off-the-shelf designs weren’t enough. We delivered uncut agitators, and Chelsea Milling cut and customized them onsite for each individual hopper.
“We spent months going through that process,” Hubbard says, “but in the end, we got a very robust solution.”
Split Hopper Auger Fillers for Faster Changeovers
But if one feature stood out above all others, Hubbard points to our split hopper design. By allowing the hopper to be opened fully for cleaning and changeovers, operators gained unmatched access and visibility.
“The access we gained was incredible,” he says. “With other systems, you had to drop the entire hopper just to peek inside. The split hopper was the number one design attribute we wanted to move forward with.”
Together, these innovations gave Chelsea Milling a filler solution that could handle Jiffy Mix’s quirks while ensuring uptime, consistency, and sanitation.
Checkweigher Feedback & Successful Packaging Modernization
While fillers ensured accurate dosing, our checkweighers provided the feedback loop to guarantee precision across the line.
“When we were making the decision to move forward with a checkweigher company, we had already decided on Spee-Dee for filling,” Hubbard explains. “That made the checkweighers much more attractive. Having a single-sourced vendor that could provide both filling and checkweighing, integrating directly into the same equipment, and providing feedback for weight adjustments on the fly—it was a huge benefit.”
That integration eliminated one of the most common challenges in packaging lines: ensuring seamless communication between machines from different OEMs.
The results spoke for themselves. During a recent plant visit, data showed nearly 10,000 packages run through the fillers and checkweighers, with only 20 rejects. Half of those weren’t true rejects at all, but intentional overweight and underweight checks performed hourly to validate system accuracy.
“Reliable and precise—absolutely,” Hubbard says.
Feeding America with Reliability
Reliability is more than an operational metric for Chelsea Milling—it’s a reflection of their brand promise. Families expect Jiffy Mix to deliver the same results every time, just like it did in their grandparents’ kitchens.
“People on the street don’t know that we needed to upgrade our packaging equipment after 50 years,” Hubbard notes. “That’s not something you want reflected on the shelves. We need to be consistent in how we provide, and we pride ourselves on that.”
Our technology and partnership ensured that Chelsea Milling could modernize its plant without compromising on that legacy. Every blue box still delivers the same neat, tidy pouch of mix—only now with the help of advanced, integrated filling and weighing systems designed for decades of reliable use.
A Partnership That Defines Success
For Hubbard, leading the modernization project was a career-defining achievement. “Going through that process with the team we have, seeing it all on paper, and watching it come to life—blue lights, little blue boxes going out the door—it’s incredibly rewarding,” he says.
And for us, it’s another chapter in its own story of supporting American food companies with equipment that is both innovative and built to last.
Our collaboration with Chelsea Milling shows what can happen when two family-owned Midwestern companies come together with a shared commitment to quality, heritage, and reliably feeding America—one little blue box at a time.
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