Gunther Salt Newsletter: Historic Challenges

We are writing this letter to explain some of the historic challenges Gunther Salt Company has had in 2019 sourcing prodcuct due to floods on the Mississippi River and mine closures, as well as detail the investment plans that are in motion to combat these same issues should they occur in 2020.

Gunther Salt Company has been sourcing its salt products from mines in Louisiana since its inception in 1902. We are the first company to barge salt into St. Louis and have been doing this ever since. Although we source product from various geographic locations in the United States and import salt occasionally, 60% of our salt is typically sourced from Louisiana.

In 2019, barges on the Mississippi Rover did not move for an unprecedented 69 days. Normally, a barge needs up to 22 days to travel from Louisiana to the terminal in St. Louis. Because of these unprecedented floods in 2019, Gunther Salt Company did not receive barges of product for 91 days. This crippled our ability to source both Louisiana Rock and Feed Mixing for our water softening, packaged ice control and agricultural customers. The floods also led our Louisiana supplier to make the decision to not offer us any Bulk Ice control salt in 2019.

Along with the shut down of the river in 2019, we also learned that our main supplier in Louisiana was required to shut down their mine for emergency repairs for 8 weeks. The shutdown began in mid-November and the mine re-opened before the end of 2019. This further hampered our efforts to source salt from Louisiana and made it impossible to keep up with demand for Feed Mixing salt, Louisiana Rock Salt and kept us from reaching our goals on all our packaged ice control products.

Because Gunther Salt Company was not able to source salt from its primary sources, we have had to use other salt suppliers that do not have the same specifications as the Louisiana Rock Salt that our customers have come to expect in our Ice Control products. With this change in suppliers, our customer base has noticed differences in the sizing, color and at times additional fines in our products which is not typical. Please be assured that this change occurred due to the supply situation and not a change in our commitment to providing quality ice control products.

For our Feed Mixing customers, Gunther Salt sourced a higher quality product at a higher cost and absorbed this cost difference for 2019 to continue to supply our customer base with product.

For Bulk Ice Control customers, we decided to import salt to supply our Ice Control customers who are used to being supplied with our Bulk Ice Control salt from Louisiana. Although the specifications on the imported salt are different from those of our Louisiana salt, we sourced the best quality product available to meet our customers’ demands.

In 2018, Gunther Salt acquired additional acreage to store more Bulk Ice Control salt and also completed the build out of a brand-new Feed Mixing storage building that can hold and process 10,000 tons of Feed Mixing. The new Feed Mixing building also enables us to load out trucks in a covered area so that Feed Mixing delivieries will no longer be delayed due to weather conditions. We also added a brand-new tote packaging line to our Feed Mixing operation that is exclusively used to package our Feed Mixing salt.

In February of 2019, we purchased a new form fill and seal packaging line that can produce 25#, 40# and 50# Poly bags. This new line has already created packaging efficiencies and our brand-new shaker that was installed in 2019 is allowing us to screen out fines in our solar salt to create an even higher quality product than ever before.

In 2020, Gunther Salt will be investing in a rail siding that will increase our rail capacity 200%. This increase in rail car capacity will help us to keep up with increasing demand from our water softening customers and give us the flexibility to source salt from additional vendors. By April of 2020, we will also have a screening operation up and running inside our new Feed Mixing salt building to process salt from other approved suppliers that will help us meet the ever-increasing demand for Feed Mixing salt in our market.

We sincerely apologize to all of our customer base for the supply and quality issues some of our customers have experienced in 2019; however, please be assured that Gunther Salt Company is making the investments necessary to improve our supply chain options and to be able to provide the highest quality salt products available. We hope that this letter will help reassure our customer base that we are committed to providing quality salt products, coupled with peerless service in 2020 and beyond. As always, we appreciate your business!

Sincerely,

Peter W. Gunther
Vice President

John M. Gunther
President