Growing from the grove

A sprawling storefront welcomes visitors, travelers and locals, enticing them to step inside the store, which features a wide array of pecans, candies, snacks, Made in Oklahoma products and more.

 
As shoppers browse their way through the market, enjoying the pecans and products the Miller family has carefully curated, they are unaware of the flurry of activity happening just down the hallway where the Miller family and their employees are busy sorting, cracking and processing pecans that will not only be featured on the shelves of their own market, but will also be shipped across the country for families to enjoy.
 
Brothers Jared and Justin Miller have built the sprawling pecan processing plant and storefront that complements their own pecan grove in a short 10-year span. The Millers created a state-of-the-art facility that transforms pecans from fresh-off-the-farm nuts to pecan halves and pieces that are used in confectionery items, baked goods and even enjoyed by the handful.
 
“We pretty much do everything from farm to table, from starting on the farm,” Jared said.
 
Starting in their sprawling 800-acre orchard that is home to rows and rows of pecan trees to their on-farm cleaning facility to their cracking facility in Afton, the Millers handle every step of the process from planting and grafting new trees to selling packaged pecans in their storefront.
 
The Miller family’s story – just like the pecans they sell – started in a northeastern Oklahoma pecan orchard.
 
Jared Miller recalled helping his father harvest pecans when Jared himself was growing up in northeastern Oklahoma. Equipped with a pecan harvester pulled by a four-wheeler, Jared’s dad began harvesting pecans for a little extra money as Jared and his brother, Justin, picked up sticks and dragged gunny sacks around area orchards.
 
“We started off really, really small,” Jared said. “My dad started off just basically harvesting pecans for Christmas money and extra bill money, just picking a few thousand pounds in the beginning. It’s just kind of grown from there.”
 
As the family grew their pecan harvesting business, they leased more and more acres of pecan orchards and eventually purchased their own orchard, which they worked to grow and expand.
 
Today, the Millers’ pecan orchards include immaculate rows of mature trees in addition to newly planted and maturing trees that they are nurturing into full production.
 
“Currently our native pecan production is around 723 acres, and we probably have about another 100 acres of improved varieties that we were harvesting,” Jared said of the orchard. “Some of it’s not in full production, and we also have another couple hundred acres of little baby trees anywhere from one year old to six or seven years old that are coming online in the near future.
 
“In our area, it takes close to 10 to 12 years to get trees to be big enough to put a mechanical shaker on and shake them. So it’s a 401(k) investment.”
 
As the Millers looked toward expanding their farm in the 2010s, they considered purchasing more land and pecan groves, but with land availability tight and land prices high, Jared and Justin decided to expand their pecan business vertically by starting a pecan processing plant.
 
“You know, when you’re a farmer, if it’s raining, you’re basically unemployed that day,” Jared said. “It’s good thing and a bad thing when you’re off work. But you know, we started the processing plant thinking we could work on rainy days, cold days, hot days, and, you know, it just fills in a lot of gaps.”
 
The Millers opened their new pecan processing facility in 2014, planning to work their way through the pecans they produced in their own orchard. By the end of the season, they had cracked just under half a million pounds of pecans.
 
“We just planned on doing our own crop, and I think our first year we ended up cracking double what we produced that year,” Jared said. “It’s just grown ever since then.”
 
Today, the Millers not only crack pecans they grow in their own orchard, but they also purchase pecans to process from neighboring orchards in addition to pecan growers from around the state, the region and the country with pecans coming as far away as Georgia.
 
While their own orchard currently supplies between 7% and 10% of the pecans the family processes each year, the search for quality pecans to keep the cracking plant running most of the year keeps Jared busy as he buys and sells pecans that are trucked to the family’s plant in Afton.
 
“I’ve bought and sold more pecans from a tractor cab than I ever have from an office,” Jared said.
 
What began in 2014 with the Millers processing around 400,000 pounds of pecans has grown tremendously. Today,  Jared estimates the facility handles nearly 8 million pounds of pecans per year.
 
The Millers proudly maintain SQF level three certification – the highest level of safety standard offered by the Global Food Safety Initiative.
 
Starting each September, the first shipments of new-crop pecans begin arriving from Georgia. As the cracking season continues, pecans from Oklahoma and surrounding states arrive as harvest progresses across the pecan belt, supplying the pecans the family needs to keep the plant humming until summertime when the plant is broken down for a deep-cleaning.
 
When pecans are delivered to the Millers’ plant, Jared said the nuts are inspected and unloaded, then put into a freezer to ensure quality. When the nuts are ready to process, they are run through the cracking line where they are sized, sanitized, cracked, sorted and thoroughly inspected before being packaged and put back into one of four freezers, which offer around 17,000 square feet of storage that helps keep the nuts fresh.
 
“What a lot of people don’t realize is that pecans are a produce, and they have natural oils,” Jared said. “They do go downhill sitting outside on your counter or shelf, so people can always just store them in the freezer.”
 
Justin oversees the plant operations where state-of-the-art equipment sizes pecans by 1/16-inch increments, and eye sorter machines use cameras and infrared sensors to rapidly inspect pecans by color and quickly eject shell fragments and retain high-quality pecans.
 
The Miller family keeps different varieties of pecans separate, allowing their customers on both the retail and wholesale sides of the business to get the exact types of pecans they desire.
 
The final step in the process is a hands-on inspection where the Millers’ employees watch pecans coming down the line and serve as a final step in removing undesirable pieces before the nuts are packaged and put into the freezer to await shipping to destinations far and wide.
 
The family ships both whole pecans and pecan pieces around the country – and beyond – to be used in a variety of food and confectionery products.
 
“Most pecan pieces are going to confectioneries,” Jared said. “They go to ice cream makers, bread makers, cakes, cupcakes and everything. Some of the pieces go to candy and major pieces are used a lot to sprinkle on either cakes or pecan logs or on candy. The halves are either going to pie manufacturers or they’re getting covered in chocolate or being used in some form of candy.”
 
Jared said the Millers are the northernmost pecan processor in the pecan belt. While the majority of shelling plants are spread from New Mexico to Georgia, the Millers’ more northern location makes them an ideal source of pecans for one of their customers in Canada. Jared said the family has even shipped pecans through a broker to Dubai.
 
While the Millers sell pecan halves and wholes by the truckload for use in confectionery, bread and other food products, their retail store serves as a welcome stop along Route 66 for travelers from around the state, nation and even the world to rest and browse a wide array of pecan-based products from the Miller’s own orchard and beyond.
 
What is now a sprawling store and gift shop almost did not make the cut as the Millers built their first processing facility.
 
“We almost didn’t build it,” Jared said of the market. “We thought, ‘Well, yes, we do want to do that too,’ but we also wondered how much traffic we would get considering where we’re located since we’re about a mile off the interstate. But we are on Route 66, so that really helps us out a bunch. But it went really well.”
 
After spending nine years in a 30-foot by 30-foot space, the family’s latest remodel last year tripled the size of the store, including expanded restroom facilities for buses.
 
Inside the store, decorated displays of pecan products span the spectrum from bags of fresh pecans to pecan oils and pies and from a wide array of pecan candies to gift items including shirts and souvenirs.
 
As a true example of “build it and they will come,” the Millers and their employees now get to meet travelers from around the globe who stop by the family’s store as they make their way down Route 66.
 
“It amazes me how many people come to this country just to drive Route 66,” Jared said. “They come from all different countries.”
 
The Millers also offer gift boxes of pecans and pecan products for organizations to sell as fundraisers in addition to selling gift packs during the holidays. Jared said the packs make a great gift for someone looking for a unique and welcomed gift.
 
No matter if it is a tourist from halfway around the world or a local neighbor popping in to buy some pecans for fall baking season, the Millers and their employees strive to produce the highest quality pecans they can as they tend to the store, work in the plant and care for the trees in their orchards.
 
“And that’s how we strive to be known: shelling the best of the best quality stuff,” Jared said.
 
One visible sign of success is the growing facility the Millers originally built in 2014. Since beginning their pecan processing operation, Jared said the family has added on to the plant nine times in the past decade with the next addition already on
the horizon.
 
As the next generation of Millers gets involved in the family operation, Jared said it will be up to them to decide what the future holds for the family business.
 
For the time being, Jared and Justin Miller are committed to producing quality pecans for friends, neighbors and customers around the nation.
 
“We just always want to do the best job that we can and really share with people what we get to see as farmers,” Jared said.