How technological innovations are transforming flour milling industry

Janifha Evangeline

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The flour milling industry is an important part of the Indian economy, responsible for producing a wide range of food products. Although the industry has a strong future owing to the growth in population and surge in demand for food products, it faces several challenges such as increasing input costs, competition from imports, a lack of skilled workers, and low productivity. Hence, the Indian government is trying to address these issues and boost the industry's growth.

For instance, the government has set up various programs to train workers and has upgraded the transportation infrastructure. It has also introduced tax incentives and other measures to support the country's farming sector. Despite these efforts, the sector still suffers from numerous problems. The profitability of most mills is low, and most of them find it difficult to survive in today's competitive environment. Therefore, the players in the industry should devise new strategies and come up with new technology solutions to improve the performance of the industry in the coming years.

Enhancing the mill management process

End-to-end process automation by leveraging applications of industry 4.0 aims to enhance the mill management by rendering quality as well as production records by utilizing equipment support IoT technology, precise adjustment of machine in order to assure flour quality consistency, decreasing production costs by removing worker overtime & reducing disguised unemployment.

In order to assure accurate & constant mixing of various types of wheat, a few companies introduced feeders that work on the principle of loss-in-weight feeding, accurately feed each wheat as per the controlled recipes & register the total weight, and this type of feeder can be used below raw wheat silos as well as tempering bins.

Increasing flour safety through special equipment for peeling & debranning

To increase flour safety, special equipment for peeling, and debranning have been introduced. While this helps in decreasing microbial count, toxin levels, chemical residue in the produced flour, was achieved by removing a huge amount of bran by using abrasive elements. Using debranning system in the screen room decreases wheat ash, reduces tempering time, and increases milling section capacity, for enhancing performance of the mill as well as the flour quality. The very first company to introduce this

technology for wheat mills was Satake & the latest development of debranning technology - the Dante system was introduced by Omas.

Addressing the milling industry's challenges through IoT solutions

In the last decade most of the innovations aimed mainly to face the challenges of the flour milling industry, such as lowering production costs, enhancing working conditions, complete process automation through application industry 4.0 & controlling product quality. Production costs can be reduced by introducing high-capacity machines to allow the construction of mills with higher capacity & with the same building volume, and equipment require easy and less maintenance for reducing the duration of the production stoppages.

Most of the innovations were in developing roller mill machine. One of the examples for recent innovation include the aero-dynamic design of chamber structure that renders air circulation to keep the roller temperature low, DAPS that was developed by Selis Machinery, and Antares Plus roller mill which is supplied with sensors measuring the temperature of the rolls & roll bearing that was introduced by Buhler.

In Antares Plus roller mill, maintenance stoppage can be minimized & it also ensures in optimizing operational safety, while particle size measuring sensor has made automatic adjustment of grinding gap possible. This system reduces energy consumption, making the system more stable & thereby making the Internet of Things or IoT machine more useful.

Currently, for assuring process control as well as flour quality, near-infrared instrument can be leveraged for continuous on-line monitoring & record the protein level, moisture content, ash, color value as well as count of specks. Thus, closed-loop control systems can be established for controlling the accurate addition of vital gluten or other additives as well. Today the multipoint NIR unit is available with IoT & is highly essential for intelligent mills.

The latest innovation that helps in mill maintenance management was an instrument which determines the state of roller flutes. Yenar introduced RollCare profile measurement device that leverages laser technology. Buhler provided rollDetect that can measure flutes state of the corrugated roller as well as the roughness of smooth roller & roughness of smooth roller. This measurement result is a report comparing the states of theoretical profile & the measured one. Thus, determining the actual wear on rolls helps in saving energy & decision of changing rolls.

The aforementioned advancements arrive as the milling industry faces various commercial challenges especially with clients who demand the ever-increasing consistency as well as higher product quality. In a highly competitive & price-sensitive market even the smallest deviation in manufacturing parameters head straight towards a miller's bottom line. And, this happens since food safety regulations tighten as well as the millers report difficulty finding properly qualified & skilled staff. Therefore, addressing these challenges would need ever-greater automation.

The road ahead

The flour milling industry generated revenue of about USD 1 billion last year, according to the Indian Ministry of Finance. However, a major threat to the Indian flour milling industry is the imports competition from several other Asian countries. Companies from other nations usually tend to manufacture cheaper products than companies present in India and this puts them at a competitive advantage & decreases the demand for locally manufactured goods. As a consequence, several Indian firms have been forced to reduce their prices to stay competitive. The flour milling industry is anticipated to reach USD 305.8 billion by 2028, as per a recent report by IMARC Group.