Start Your Own Flour Mill

Summary: Food processing can never be out of business. And one of the ways you could enter in that never-ending cycle is by supplying flour for making bread, biscuits and pasta.

Find out the process involved in turning wheat into flour. This knowledge could help you start a business of flour milling.

Kitchen-Scale Flour Milling

If yours is a simple flour milling business, you can mill flour that comes to you. Manual and electric grain mills for use in the kitchen, which can also be used as flour mill, are available at $100 to $700 inclusive of shipping. Two of the features that affect prices are the material of the mill, the noise level and their adjustability. Those made of stainless steel, operate with low noise level, have lower heat production, generate less dust in the air, and can be adjusted for fine or coarser output cost more. Metal and plastic materials are preferred over wood. The recommended milling rate is 40 lbs. of fine flour per hour.

Commercial-Scale Flour Milling

But if you intend to supply graded flour, you would have to take care of wheat cleaning and wheat conditioning prior to milling. Wheat cleaning involves grading of the wheat according to certain characteristics and blending some grades to obtain the desired flour. Wheat, depending on their protein content, is classified as soft wheat, medium hard wheat and hard wheat. The type of wheat will determine whether it would be ultimately used for bread, biscuits, or pasta, or something else. Wheat conditioning involves adding a certain quantity of water, and allowing the prepared wheat to stand for several hours. Then the actual milling process begins to produce flour, wheat germ and bran. The flour is then bagged and usually stored for several days to age prior to delivery to makers of biscuits, pasta, crackers, and other baked goods. You can also sell the bran and wheat germ to makers of breakfast cereals or animal feeds.

If yours is a commercial-scale business, you would be dealing with wheat breeders or farmers, wheat traders, suppliers and the end users of flour. High-level processing would involve more sophisticated inspection and equipment (such as magnetic separator, aspirator, de-stoner, disc separator, scourer, and sifters) and specialists, like a chemist. It would also involve larger spaces and infrastructure. A list of flour machinery for sale is in ThomasNet.

Flour Milling Business Requirements

Before starting flour milling business check the regulation of your town or state to determine what permit and certificates you need to secure. Of concern in this process is the dust particle generated from the milling and the risk of an explosion caused by the suspension of flour dust in the air. For smaller quantities, this is not a concern, but for larger volumes, care should be taken to prevent this from happening.