World Grain - April 2012 - 43

FEATURE: LIFTING THE SCREEN ON INDIAN MILLING

CHAKKI ATTA For the last 10 years, roller mill owners have been increasingly targeting the market for packaged branded atta. Traditionally, Indian families store wheat at home and take 10 to 15 kilograms (kg) at a time to chakkis for custom milling. In large cities, this practice has been slowly dying out as busy lifestyles and dual income families cause many to opt for packaged atta from shops and supermarkets. In the largest cities, only 10% to 30% of families still take wheat to chakkis. Often they are the more well-off ones, with domestic help available to perform this task. Depending on the state, a quarter to three quarters of roller milling companies have also installed lines of mostly Indian-style horizontal stone mills in order to produce their own brands of atta in all package sizes. The mills make use of the cleaning sections and bagging lines of their roller mills. Indian consumers prefer chakki atta over roller mill atta for its taste and texture. It is commonly thought that stone grinding breaks the starch sufﬁciently to release extra sweetness while burning it slightly to give added ﬂavor to chapatis (ﬂat bread cooked on a griddle) and nan (ﬂat oven bread). Some of the most successful roller milling companies are contracted copackers of chakki atta for the handful of national brands. By far, the leader in this segment is the domestic consumer goods giant ITC, whose Aashirvaad brand sells 100,000 tonnes per month. Multinationals General Mills and Hindustan Unilever have also targeted this segment for over a decade with their Pillsbury and Annapurna brands, respectively. Besieged by local lowprice competitors unburdened by either the high overhead costs or heavy advertising budgets, both companies have retrenched. None of these market leaders own their own chakki mills, relying instead on the larger ﬂour milling companies who invest in lines of large diameter horizontal stone mills to supply them. According to C.S. Saboo, managing director of Sunstone Engineering Inwww.World-Grain.com / World Grain / April 2012

The historic Century Flour Mills Ltd., established in 1955 in Chennai in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, still operates at a capacity of nearly 150 tonnes per day roller milling and another 100 tonnes per day stone milling.

dustries, a major manufacturer of stone mills, there are over 50 roller milling companies that also dispose of production lines of 15 to 25 stone mills. Overall growth in the commercial whole wheat atta segment has been driven by the entry of hundreds of new players. As most urban and many rural consumers switch to ready-made atta, new local commercial stone milling enterprises have sprung up, particularly in the areas of heavy wheat production and consumption, resulting in ﬁerce price competition. Barriers to entry are minimal. Just a handful of stone mills are sufﬁcient to start up a commercial atta mill, preferably with a cleaning section and bagging and packaging lines. Wheat can be purchased by the truckload from traders at mandis or at a discount if it is illegally diverted from government distribution channels. A brand with colorful 5-kg, 10-kg or 25-kg packaging can be created easily. These small local companies produce a fresh product tailored to local preferences. Their packaged atta can be marketed directly to wholesalers and brokers who supply retail shops. Just in the 200-km)corridor between Mumbai and Pune, Saboo estimates there have been 50 new commercial chakki

millers started up in recent years to supply the two largest cities in Maharashtra state. FORTIFIED ATTA A phenomenon that has also stimulated commercial atta production has been policy changes in several states to distribute subsidized vitamin- and mineral-fortiﬁed atta to ration card holders under their Public Distribution Systems, instead of bagged wheat which beneﬁciaries would normally take to local chakkis for custom milling but which is often illegally “leaked out” of distribution channels. Both roller milling companies with or without chakki production and the new chakki atta companies have been able to qualify for production quotas under these fortiﬁed atta schemes, whereby they receive wheat for fee-based milling into fortiﬁed atta. For example, in Rajasthan, where daily per capita wheat consumption of close to 300 grams is the highest of any state, the largest program for fortiﬁed atta now operates. Some 120 mills, including 70 roller milling companies, are ofﬁcially grinding about 95,000 tonnes of atta monthly for distribution in 10-kg packages to most of 14.4 million ration card-holding families in all categories through a network
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World Grain - April 2012

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