Steaming rice flows off a conveyor belt in a plant off South Lauderdale.

"Try it," says operations manager Steve Strong.

He offers a few grains of instant brown rice from gloved hands.

“Nutty, isn’t it?” Strong asks, munching it like popcorn. “People overlook rice. It feeds the world.”

Meet the people behind Memphis' Riviana Foods Inc., a rice processing company employing more than 180 people in its state-of-the-art, 431,000 square-foot facility.

The plant processes, cooks and packages as many as 700 products including Mahatma®, Carolina®, Success®, Minute® and Gourmet House® -- in the course of a month -- rotating in and out by demand.

That's 450 trucks per week streaming through the South Memphis landscape. And facility manager James Gibbs notes, that’s only the beginning.

"We're big, but we're still fine tuning," he said. "Riviana has a bright future in Memphis."

And that future looks to include hiring at least 70 more full-time positions, Gibbs says, with enough
space and equipment in the plant to almost double their existing volume, should the need arise.

The Houston-based company bought property across the street from its old facility, formerly run by Strong, and began moving operations from plants in Louisiana and Texas into the new building nearly five years ago. Unlike its predecessor, the current facility was optimized for truck and rail distribution only a few miles from Arkansas, where more than half the country's long-grain rice is grown.

The facility, with an active, on-site safety center and full-scale kitchen still under construction, was built to sustain not only a sizeable earthquake, but also the product load of five plants combined.

Weaving through a labyrinth of towering silos, packing supplies, bundles of product ready to ship and brightly colored, beeping forklifts, Strong shows examples of the way they do business.

Touch-screen monitors mounted at eye level allow floor operators to control every nuance of production in real time.

"The best decisions can be made at the floor level," says Gibbs, who worked his way up through the company at its Houston plant before coming to Memphis. "Operators can communicate with supervisors and make changes on the fly. They don't have to have a tremendous amount of support because they don't need it."

Upgrades and automation en route to a paperless plant: Gibbs said that's where Riviana wants to be.

"That's a big change for us as a company," he says. "It empowers the operators to share a bigger role in running the business every day."

The team of managers lead daily classes for new employees. The six- to eight-week training sessions are customized to fit not only the position, but also the person's skill sets and educational background.

Riviana Foods is located in what city leaders dub a Renewal Community Zone – a swath of Memphis that has long suffered from decline but has the potential to rebound with renewed industrial development.

At present, 28 percent of Riviana’s Memphis workforce lives within the renewal zone, scattered throughout Downtown, North and South Memphis. As many as 45 percent live in Super District 8, the city's southwest corner, and 80 percent reside within Shelby County borders.

All of these new workers are screened by the Tennessee Career Center before taking a job on the lines.

"It's exciting to watch new folks come in," Gibbs says. "We're putting tools in their hands, teaching them how to use them, showing them the business and how to make the right decisions in the right circumstances. It's really something to see."

In December, the plant is scheduled to implement a new ready to serve line under the Minute rice label. Currently manufactured in Spain at a plant by Riviana's parent company, Ebro Foods, S.A., before it is shipped to the U.S., Minute ready to serve rice is a microwavable, precooked package of rice requiring only one minute to heat.

Strong says the positive change will be "the culmination of a lot of hard work and effort." And Gibbs says, “We will continue to grow our business and expand the products and volume here at the Memphis facility.”

“We took our time. We wanted to get this right," he adds.