Located in rural Phillipsburg, Kan., the new Amber Wave Wheat Protein Facility (a division of Summit Agricultural Group) is a leader in milling, wheat protein extraction and use of renewable biofuels. Completed in 2023 and now serving as the largest wheat protein ingredients production facility in North America (producing 20% of the gluten consumed in the United States annually), Amber Wave’s production of Amber­Pro Vital Wheat Gluten serves everything from commercial bakeries and food ingredient plants to alternative meat manufacturers, pet food processors and specialty feed companies. It has dramatically strengthened America’s competitiveness in the global gluten production market.

Amber Wave’s state-of-the-art milling, processing and packaging equipment, along with the facility’s high-tech automation and air handling systems, all support the company’s commitments to safety, quality and sustainability. 

Decker Electric, Wichita, Kan., provides design-build services for electrical, instrumentation, fiber optic, telecommunications, access control and security camera systems that have helped ensure the facility’s robust and efficient operations for years to come.

Founded in 1977 by Steve Decker, the nearly 50-year-old Decker Electric started out doing residential and commercial work but has since focused primarily on heavy industrial applications in the food processing, agricultural, oil and gas, and railroad industries as well as on emerging technologies such as electric vehicle charging and access control security.

“While our headquarters is in Wichita, we work in 20–25 states and partner with 40 local union jurisdictions, but we’re also very customer-­focused and relationship-based,” said Ben Wilson, executive director of business development for Decker Electric. 

With support from more than 200 employees, “we take pride in impacting finished products involving everything from what people serve on their kitchen tables to the ingredients in pet food and more, and we want to be the go-to team for our clients and build relationships for the long term,” he said.   

Decker Electric got involved in the Amber Wave project in 2021 through its partner in automation and milling technology, Park City, Kan.-based Kice Industries, and the project’s Ames, Iowa-based general contractor, Todd & Sargent.   

The exterior of Amber Wave’s new gluten extraction building in Phillipsburg, Kan.

Cable tray installed by the Decker Electric team in Amber Wave’s motor control center room

Managing Mother Nature

With up to 50 team members on-site at the height of the project, the Decker Electric crew quickly found their rhythm.

“We determined that working 58-hour weeks ensured a good balance of production and safety for our crew; when you work too many more hours, you start to see a loss of productivity and a rise in safety incidents,” Wilson said.  

Despite a tight labor market, the appealing employment opportunity helped attract qualified workers from Kansas and Nebraska, the border of which was just 10 miles from the Amber Wave facility.

“While quite a few of our crew members hailed from Wichita, which is 3.5 hours away from Amber Wave, we also sourced labor from nearby Local 661 in Hutchinson, Kan., so we had no issues attracting manpower,” Wilson said. “Many of the crew members from Wichita stayed in campgrounds within their own campers or arranged for hotel accommodations or Airbnbs, but ultimately everyone was within a 20-mile radius of the project site.”  

Wilson made numerous trips from Wichita to the job site to help oversee activities over the project’s two-year span. 

Though pandemic-era supply chain issues affected some of their material needs, the team did their best to mitigate them.  

“The project team ordered our Allen-Bradley motor control centers, transformers, Square D distribution switchgear and other power distribution equipment early in 2021 to get a jump-start on the project and, luckily, didn’t experience too many delays,” Wilson said. “Additionally, the first half of the project was all outdoors, so there were no issues with distancing and masks, and, by the time we started work indoors, the pandemic was subsiding.”

Winter weather in the nation’s heartland was another matter, especially during the project’s second winter in late 2022 and early 2023.

A Decker Electric team member oversees installations in the motor control center room.		The gluten storage tank at Amber Wave Wheat Protein Facility.

“At that point, we were working in a seven-story concrete box, which is unfortunately a good insulator of really cold temperatures. It seemed even colder inside the building than it was outside because concrete retains the cold so well,” Wilson said, recalling one particularly significant ice-and-snow storm during the project, as well as a few occasions when wind chills were 10–20 degrees below zero.  

“Along with temporary heating and conditioning equipment provided by our colleagues at Todd & Sargent, our foreman also helped protect our people from the elements by planning indoor work during the worst of it and waiting until the weather got better to tackle outdoor projects,” he said.

Though the team was well-versed in mill construction, Wilson said that project logistics also proved challenging.

“Working in a seven-story building with no elevator, we were craning equipment and tools to each level, using scissor lifts, or our guys were walking the stairs, which added a layer of difficulty,” Wilson said. “In addition, having several hundred contractors from various trades all on the same site at the same time requires you to coordinate things carefully and plan well for safety and efficiency.”

'A facility of excellence'

Aside from some final requests for tweaks after the project concluded, the Decker Electric team demobilized in October 2023 and received high marks on their work from the client and project partners.

“It’s the greatest compliment when our colleagues from Kice Industries and Todd & Sargent keep calling us back and want us as a partner on these projects because they know our work and believe in our capabilities,” Wilson said. “The customer was extremely pleased with the facility overall and praised the way the crews from Decker, Kice and Todd & Sargent came together as a team, shared their honest feedback, assisted with anything that needed to be done and successfully executed Amber Wave’s vision. 

“Amber Wave’s then-CFO impressed on us early on that we were there to build a facility of excellence where no corners were to be cut and where outstanding production was the expectation,” he continued. “They were phenomenal to work with, conceived an impressive, state-of-the-art facility and trusted us to deliver on their vision.”  

He added that their working relationship reflected honest exchanges and a great balance of budget, timeline and execution. All parties contributed and were delighted with the results. 

“We’re proud of our continued positive relationship with Amber Wave, Kice Industries and Todd & Sargent,” Wilson said, “and it’s what keeps us all coming back.”

Among lessons learned, Wilson said that Decker Electric applied a lot of takeaways from its Amber Wave experience to another mill project in Indiana, including opportunities for cost savings around cable tray and construction.

“As a company, we always pull our entire project team into a formal ‘lessons learned’ exercise after every project to assess where we excelled and where improvement could be made next time,” Wilson said. “No project is ever perfect, but, overall, this one went really well.”

So well, in fact, that their Amber Wave project won a 2024 NECA Project Excellence Award in the industrial category, which Wilson and his colleagues are proud of and grateful for.

“Because a gluten facility is very unique and Amber Wave is now the largest of its kind in North America, we identified this as a great industrial project with a real ‘wow’ factor,” Wilson said. “Our NECA [Project] Excellence Award is a huge testament to everyone who worked on this project—from our on-site leadership, wiremen and project manager to the safety director, accounting staff, project coordinator, business development professionals and more. Every project of ours involves a true team effort, and to have our team be able to share in that prestigious industry recognition is incredibly rewarding.”

Wilson also takes pride in the many other positive outcomes associated with the new Amber Wave facility, including the numerous jobs it has created in rural America since becoming fully operational in 2025 and the impressive new bar it sets in automation, technology and sustainability.

“Decker Electric is unique in that we build and wire a lot of less glamorous but essential things that people don’t always think about, including systems that enable the production or delivery of food, water and other necessities,” Wilson said. “But the fact is, we love doing the behind-the-scenes work and getting the opportunity to meet a lot of great people along the way.”

Decker Electric | Amber Wave Wheat Protein Facility / stock.adobe.com | BakiBullah