Tom Mick

Grain commission gives wheat to South American mill, hopes to open new market

By MATTHEW WEAVER

Capital Press

An experiment now under way may result in new profitability for overseas milling customers and an expanded market for Pacific Northwest soft white wheat.

The Washington Grain Commission recently donated 43 tons of soft white wheat to one of the largest flour mills in Colombia. The idea was to persuade the mill to use soft white wheat instead of soft red wheat, commission CEO Tom Mick said Nov. 12 in Spokane.

The South American industry has pushed the concept of blending soft wheat with hard wheat, primarily dark northern spring wheat, to produce bread products, Mick said.

With the assistance of consultant Peter Lloyd, the millers found they can use a blend of soft white wheat to get an almost identical loaf volume, a measurement used in Latin America.

The ideal blend, Mick said, is 70 percent soft white wheat and 30 percent dark northern spring wheat. If customers don’t like the dark northern spring wheat, the ideal blend is 60 percent hard red winter wheat and 40 percent soft white wheat.

Some work remains to be done with crackers, cakes and pastries, but Mick said the commission is taking the next step, sending soft white wheat to Morocco for testing there.

“This is something new to the white wheat industry, because when you blend soft white with dark northern spring wheat, people think it’s like replacing sugar with salt,” Mick said. “But there’s a unique kind of a marriage, the miller told me, that soft white works very well in combination with DNS.”

Mick said there would definitely be an impact on growers in the future, but things are now at the experimental stage.

“I hope we have a heck of a success story here,” he said.

After getting verification from the project in Morocco, he plans to marry the two projects together, ask Lloyd for more information and utilize several bakers to conduct further studies to document profitability.