Flour milling is separation before it is grinding. A grain of wheat holds bran, germ and endosperm, and the whole craft is opening the grain, keeping those parts apart, then recombining them in the proportion each product needs. Here is how that runs at Ittehad, stage by stage.
1. Intake and grading
Wheat is sampled at the gate before it is tipped. We check moisture, broken and shrivelled grain, foreign seed and smell. A lot that is not right is refused there and then, because nothing downstream can repair poor grain.
2. Cleaning
Separators sieve out anything larger or smaller than wheat. Aspiration lifts chaff and dust on a current of air. A destoner removes stones and mud balls by density. What continues is wheat and very little else.
3. Conditioning
Clean wheat is dampened and rested in tempering bins. Water toughens the bran and softens the endosperm, so the grain peels cleanly at the rolls instead of shattering. Skip this rest and the flour is speckled and gritty, and no sifting later will fix it.
4. The break system
Corrugated break rolls turning at different speeds shear the grain open and scrape endosperm off the bran across several passages, each set a little closer than the last.
5. Purification and reduction
Purifiers use a moving sieve and rising air to separate clean semolina from bran carrying fragments. Smooth reduction rolls then bring that semolina down to flour fineness in small steps, which keeps the starch intact and the colour bright.
6. Sifting and blending
Plansifters sort every stream by particle size. The finest becomes maida. Coarser streams plus a controlled share of fine bran are blended into super fine atta and fine atta. This is where our products are really defined.
7. Fortification
A dosing unit adds the micronutrient premix required under the national fortification programme: iron for anaemia, folic acid for healthier pregnancies, zinc for growth and immunity. It changes nothing about taste or colour.
8. Packing and dispatch
Flour is filled on calibrated scales, stamped with the packed weight, stitched, stacked and dispatched, usually the same day it was milled.
Checks we repeat every shift
- Moisture, so flour keeps and buyers are not paying for water.
- Colour, read from a sample slick by a trained eye.
- Particle size, confirmed on sieve tests against the product specification.
- Dough behaviour, because the kitchen is the only test that counts.
- Packed weight, verified on calibrated scales at the packing floor.
When a reading drifts, the shift stops and it is corrected. Stopping a mill is cheaper than recalling a truck, and far cheaper than losing a buyer of twenty years.