In Corinna, sawdust good as gold Northwoods Bedding found, hooked its niche

CORINNA – Jim Medeiros walked up to the 25-foot-tall sawdust pile and scooped up two hands full of the curled, popcorn-colored shavings. Deeply sniffing the product, he pronounced it a mix of spruce and fir. “See how large the bits are?” he asked. “The pine is finer.”

Medeiros is a man who knows his sawdust.

As founder of Northwoods Bedding in Corinna, Medeiros has taken his second career – once just a simple search for good horse bedding – to great heights. He supplies much of Agway and Blue Seal with prime bedding sawdust and serves horse farms, breeding facilities and large dairy farms throughout the Mid-Atlantic states.

“I have found a niche,” Medeiros said this week. Building a reputation for a clean, quality product, Medeiros’ four-year-old company now sells more than 1 million bags of bedding a year. Each bag is sold in retail outlets for between $3.79 and $4.29.

The company operates six days a week, running two shifts with 18 employees, and can produce 4,000 35-pound bags of sawdust bedding daily.

“We go through 80 tons a day of shavings,” which are culled from mills throughout northern Maine and Canada, Medeiros said.

One key to Medeiros’ success is his fleet of tractor-trailer trucks. “We can deliver to our customers from here to Virginia, Ohio and Indiana,” he said. “We are also looking at expanding into Florida. By owning my own trucks, I can control the product from ‘cradle to grave.'”

The high cost of fuel, however, is having an impact. “The expense of running my trucks has now exceeded what I pay for sawdust,” he said.

With diesel fuel at $3 a gallon, “it is a great advantage that we have our own trucks,” Medeiros said. “We can come back from a delivery with a truck full, making the trip partially pay for itself.” Instead of coming back empty from a New Jersey horse farm, Medeiros can haul newspaper inserts, Pepsi products or, in one case, a truckload of wall clocks.

Medeiros said the greatest challenge of operating a business in Maine is the economy. “In southern New England and the mid-Atlantic states, people will pay for quality, where here, most people want economy,” he said. He said he walks a fine financial line by locating closer to his sawdust suppliers than his customers.

“I’m a couple of hundred miles closer to my customers than my major competition, Canada,” he said.

Medeiros said he constantly keeps an eye on the stability of Maine’s sawmills, which also are bending under the weight of higher fuel costs.

“Where is the breaking point?” he asked. “If we lost these mills, the economic impact on the state of Maine would be devastating.”

Northwoods Bedding operates from a converted potato house just outside downtown Corinna, but the company had very modest beginnings from Medeiros’ home. Medeiros was looking for horse bedding for his own animals and decided that he might make a part-time job out of brokering bedding for others. When not selling bedding, Medeiros was a Maine State Police trooper.

“I brought a tractor-trailer load home, kept half for me and tried to sell the other half,” he recalled. “I couldn’t sell a bag.” Determined to make his plan work, Medeiros persisted and had a small but steady clientele within two years.

“But I found I had no flexibility, no quality control, no volume protection and no consistency,” he said. “I was at the mercy of everyone else.”

Medeiros decided to jump in with both feet and opened up the Corinna facility. It took a year and a half of planning and gathering the necessary equipment before the plant was running full steam. Last fall, Medeiros made the decision to resign as a trooper and put all his energy into the business.

“I have never regretted the decision,” he said. “If I was going to do this, I knew I had to do it well and put out a great product.”

It is a simple yet impressive operation.

Outside, a specially constructed ramp and lift actually tip a possum-belly trailer up in the air to dump the sawdust brought from the mills. The sawdust is then moved into large storage piles according to species. A payloader mixes the various woods into a recipe that blends large, “fluffy” bits with the smaller, more absorbent chips. From there, the recipe is loaded into a hopper that uses sensors and augers to push the sawdust to a second-floor bagging center.

There, a four-station, two-story high bagging machine fills, compacts and staples each 35-pound bag in 17 seconds flat.

“It is very efficient and we have minimum waste,” Medeiros said. The bags are then propelled to the loading dock on wheeled conveyors. Company employees have even figured out a way to stack the bags of bedding for optimum loading.

Brushing sawdust from the sleeves of his shirt, Medeiros said he is doing everything he can to produce a quality, made-in-America product.

“This may be a niche market,” he said, “but I want to be a big player.”