Are we providing enough trained mill leaders?
Full details
| Authors & editors | |
| Publisher | Milling & Grain |
| Year of publication | 2017 October |
| Languages | |
| Medium | Digital |
| Edition | 1 |
| Topics | |
| Tags | |
| Scope & content | By Alexander Waugh, Director, nabim Milling and Grain have put Mr Waugh’s astute and perceptive talk into this edition and believe it to give some insightful thoughts as to how to continue to create a sustainable managerial workforce within milling globally. Mr Waugh is the Director General of the UK flour miller’s association, NABIM, and Secretary of the Rice Association. He has a long involvement in the grain world, having worked in the farming sector before joining nabim in 1987. He is a council member of the Campden and Chorleywood Food Research Association and is a former Vice-President of Euromaisers, which represent EU maize millers, and has also been a board member of HGCA Ltd., (now AHDB Cereals and Oilseeds), an organisation that brings together UK farmers, grain traders and processors to promote the wellbeing of the grain sector. You have a snapshot of the UK, which is what I know best. We can see that flour milling is really at the heart of our food culture in the UK. An awful lot of the foods that people in our country eat every day have flour at their core. For example, we purchase; 150 million slices of bread, five million biscuits, 4.5 million portions of cakes, buns etc., and two million pizzas, all of which are made from British flour and bought every day. The UK is a country of about 60 million people, and we’re using about 11,000 tonnes of flour every day, every year. So it’s quite a big deal! UK flour milling, we heard just now about the significance of capacity utilisation, mills in the UK are generally running at between 156-160 hours per week, so there is not much down time. Production throughout the year varies a little bit, so capacity tends to be structured to fill the peak time, which is in the autumn. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty tight ship and the mills are generally both close to people and wheat. So a bit unusually in the UK we tend to take wheat directly to the flour mill, 66 percent of our wheat will have completely from a farm without having gone through a central store, and the rest will either be imported or come through a central store – it is a little bit of different model perhaps to flour milling around the world. The average production is at 80,000 tonnes per year and wheat usage is at roughly 5.5 million tonnes per year. Nabim is the trade association for flour milling, we’re representing about 99 percent of production in the UK. We also have a group of associate members which are the businesses which are allied to flour milling, so whether that’s a grain supply or packaging manufacturers, machinery manufacturers, or plant breeders. There is a very good connection between the flour milling business upstream to our grain suppliers and plant breeding as well as downstream to baking. Our association is active in a lot of activities, regulatory affairs, relations throughout the supply chain, consumer promotion work, health and safety and also raining, and here we are to the subject in hand. …Read more. |
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