Smuckers battles bloggers over flour

CLEVELAND (AP) — J.M. Smucker Co. is trying to get out of a jam with fans of White Lily flour, a 125-year-old brand that Smucker acquired in 2006 and has recently been the subject of wild rumors fueled by bloggers.

The packaging calls White Lily “a Southern tradition since 1883,” so purists were alarmed when the original but aging White Lily mill in Knoxville, Tenn., was closed at the end of June. Online critics bemoaned the fact that the flour is now produced exclusively up north — in northwest Ohio — and have threatened a boycott.

“Smucker’s is dead to me,” one blogger wrote. “With a name like that, it used to be good.”

Some loyalists of the specialty flour have taken to hoarding it, buying five and six bags at a time out of fear that it is changing.

Facing a brouhaha in the baking aisle, Smucker, the Orrville, Ohio-based company best known for its jams and jellies, posted a message on the White Lily brand Web site to try to set things straight.

“Throughout its history the ownership of the White Lily brand has changed hands numerous times,” the message read. The note went on to explain that the Ohio mill isn’t new but has been producing the flour for years and is closer to the growing fields in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan, where the soft red winter wheat used to make White Lily has always come from.

White Lily “is considered an institution as far as Southerners are concerned and is the only flour that Southerners use for biscuits,” said Robert Carter, executive chef of the Peninsula Grill in Charleston, S.C.