World Grain - August 2011 - 53

BestFlours No. 13 / 11

CUSTOMER TALK
5

Two ﬂours for totally different requirements ... That’s true. Tortilla ﬂour doesn’t need high volume, for example; we even have to reduce the gluten a little. It’s also important for the disks of bread to roll well and stay soft. How does Mühlenchemie help you meet these requirements? When we are trying out new products or ﬂours I always go to the Mühlenchemie baking laboratory in Mexico City. We work on the current projects together with the applications technologists on the spot. We test various ﬂour improvers, for example. When we have found a suitable additive I buy a small amount and make up a trial ﬂour on our own plant. If the test brings the results we wanted, we include the product in our routine. And to ﬁnish, there is usually another exchange of opinion with the Mühlenchemie staff. So you could say the MC baking laboratory is an important element of your product development? Yes, you could certainly say that. I do have a bakery of my own here at the mill, and a laboratory with a Farinograph, Extensograph and an Alveograph and equipment for determining the ash and gluten content, but the Mühlenchemie laboratory is much better equipped. For example, I could have the Falling Number determined there, too. And the opinion of the specialists is important to me. What requirements do your customers generally have when they approach you? The most important consideration for the bakeries is the price. That is the main criterion. The bakeries want to save on dough and achieve a large baked volume

nevertheless. So we recently started using the Mühlenchemie product Alphamalt EFX Mega. Our experience with that has been very good indeed; the additive binds a lot of water and ensures a large volume. The volume yield is excellent. What is the position with European specialities like baguettes and croissants? Is there a market for them? There certainly is in Mexico City. And we are starting to interest our customers in German bread. But in general it’s true to say there isn’t very much diversity. Some products have no chance at all here in Mexico. Can you give us concrete examples of that? We once produced organic ﬂours for the Carrefour retail chain, but the project was dropped after three or four years. The business with cake mixes is difﬁcult, too; things like that just don’t work here. Housewives prefer to buy the cakes readymade. What do Mexican consumers look for, then? What is important to them? By and large the consumers here are very price-conscious. So even ordinary wheat bread is – well, not exactly a luxury, but more for the middle and upper classes. The biggest competitor for bread is the maize tortilla; it’s the cheapest product and so it’s still the most popular. So what would you say is the biggest difference between milling in Germany and milling in Mexico? All German millers have excellent training. Here in Mexico, milling isn’t a skilled occupation at all. So there are two ways of ﬁnding qualiﬁed personnel. One is to employ food technologists, who have a

university education. The other is to look for people with technical skills and train them yourself. That is part of my work here, too: I pass my knowledge on and qualify our own people. You have been living in Mexico for twelve years now. Have you ever regretted taking such a step? Never! Because here in Mexico you are not subjected to pressure and stress in your working life. At least, that is true of my job in the Millco Group. As the owner’s family trusts me completely, I can work quite independently on the technical level. To work in such a good and peaceful atmosphere is a real pleasure.

Siegfried Oliver Haslinger
The 41-year-old master miller was trained at one of Germany’s biggest mills, the Rosenmühle in Landshut, Bavaria. After about ten years of practical experience in the industry he was attracted by a job advertisement for a Mexican mill in the trade journal “Mühle & Mischfutter”, which promised adventure. He applied for the job and received an offer and an air ticket from his future employer. After various other stages in his career he joined Grupo Millco and modernized the wheat mill Molino San Pedro up to the end of 2010. But a few months after this interview the milling expert, who is much in demand, accepted a further challenge and took on a new post in the Spanish-speaking world.

World Grain - August 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of World Grain - August 2011