In November 1993, Dakota Growers Pasta Company began operation in Carrington, North Dakota. The cooperative has more than twelve hundred members from North Dakota, Minnesota, and Montana, and employs about 230 people. Dakota Growers annually produces about 100 million pounds of pasta in fifty different varieties. Marketed under the label Dakota Growers Pasta, the product is packaged for private labels, food service, and ingredient markets. In 1996, Dakota Growers began a $5-million expansion to double the processing capacity of the Carrington plant.