A revolutionary idea was transformed into the Milling Hub project, the traceability motor for the food industries, one of the largest agro-industrial investments of the last 20 years made in Cremona. Companies that must guarantee product quality and traceability are provided with the great opportunity of having an exclusive “turnkey” milling plant without having to sustain the costs of building and running a mill.m
Not much time has passed by since the idea was planted and has started to sprout. In recent years, Ocrim, aware that many Italian industries required a milling plant…but the offers often did not entirely meet their needs, realised that most companies came from another sector of the agri-food industry and already had various production lines (pasta, bread, pastries, etc.). Building a mill would have enabled these companies to close the chain, guaranteeing quality and traceability. But the extensive investment was a difficult, if not impossible, obstacle to overcome. The mill thus remained a dream put on hold for better times.
An important passage in Ocrim’s mission is expressed in the pay-off “Walk the Italian Way”, a concept that goes beyond the boundaries of the company’s strategies because it responds to a higher goal, that of promoting development of Italian Made agri-food products. And this is how the “Milling Hub” began to take shape: making a dedicated mill together with qualified staff available to the customer, without the initial burden of the construction and running costs, thereby giving companies with characteristics of excellence the opportunity to close the chain. The CEO of Ocrim SpA, Alberto Antolini, has shared the project proposal with the CEO of B.F. SpA, Federico Vecchioni, thereby establishing the Milling Hub, a unique start-up that exclusively offers the opportunity to trace the product and to give more future to the Italian Made.
The work on the first mill started at the end of 2019 alongside Ocrim’s plants at the Canal Port. The choice is not accidental but, rather, forward-looking, in view of a future interconnection with the rail and river system. The first 150 T/24 h Milling Hub for processing durum wheat for the production of semolina for pasta production is ready and is in an advanced testing phase. The plant will be shortly made available to the first customer, the forerunner of a revolutionary project that will give great impetus to the quality of the Italian agri-food sector.