Storage, homogenization and flour blending system, with highly automation, is the OCRIM answer to the high-level artisan production market requests for specific blends. Recently it’s the installation at the Parma plant of Molini Agugiaro&Figna, one of the most avant-garde Italian companies in the milling art.
The Markets Demand More Productive Flexibility
“Diversify the production”. This is the key word that in these last times spreads more and more in the avant-garde mills strategic plans, the most attentive to the needs of the expanding market segments. The requests of special flour that come from those customers that are the most demanding, those that experience new “tastes” and they work with high quality raw materials, such as the artisans of the bread-making and high catering, pastry chefs and starry pizza maker, are frequent. The most experiencing millers know that don’t exist good flours or bad flours, but exist suitable flours and not suitable flours for a specific use. For a mill being able to offer in a single product a combination of different characteristics of different flours is an important advantage in terms of competitivity. From the qualitative point of view the flour blending allows you to be obtain a more uniform product – and most relevant to the customer request – respect to the product obtained by mixing the grains. The point is being able to give the possibility of “build” these flours blends in the most advantageous way from economic, qualitative and rheological point of view. The plant designed by OCRIM responds to all these characteristics and offers a homogenization and a high precision flours blending system, with weighing and batch dosing system (which allows the addition of the individual components in sequence) for solve any eventual problem linked to micro- and macro-ingredients management.
The Molini Agugiaro&Figna Plant
Molini Agugiaro&Figna is among the most modern and cutting-edge milling companies in Europe, specializing in the milling of soft wheat. Its origins date back at XV century when two historic families of millers, Agugiaro and Figna, decided to share their knowledge and to dedicate large resources to the search of raw materials and new fine blends. The grains processing of the best crops in the world takes place in the three plants located in Padova, Perugia and Parma. At Parma plant, OCRIM has installed a storage, homogenization and flours blending system with a capacity of 45 T/h. The plant is made up of six homogenization bins (185 T each) to make uniform the batches of ground product. Each bin is equipped with its own suction system (thus avoiding any kind of contamination) and mechanical recycling to make operative the homogenizing effect, during the pneumatic load. The homogenized product is transferred to the 7 feeding bins of the blending line (capacity 80 T each), also equipped with 4 bins for macro-ingredients (capacity 15 T each). There is also a dosing unit for micro-ingredients consisting of six feeders. Each group (principal bins, micro- and macro-ingredients bins) is equipped with its own batch scale for weighing and dosing the desired product accurately before being poured into the mixer, having a useful capacity of 5.000,00 L. The mixer is able to obtain a perfect blend in just 28’’, according to the customer recipe. The finished and sifted product is finally sent to the final destination of bagging, packaging and shipping in bulk.
