IN terms of flour millers in Japan, the Nisshin Flour Milling company is something of a powerhouse.
Nisshin has nine plants spread throughout Japan as well as flour mills in five other countries and has a combined total milling capacity of 20,260 tonnes a day.
Earlier this year, the Nisshin Seifun Group, which runs Nisshin Flour Milling, bought Australian flour miller, ingredients supplier and baker Allied Pinnacle.
Included in its assets is the Allied flour mill situated in North Fremantle.
Nisshin's nine plants in Japan have the capacity to process 8100t of wheat a day and growers on the recent CBH Grower Study Tour were provided with an opportunity to inspect one of its bigger factories, the Tsurumi plant.
This plant, which is based in Kawasaki city within Tokyo, processes 2150t of wheat a day.
Japan imports about 5 million tonnes of wheat a year and Nisshin uses 2mt every year, or 40 per cent of the total import volume, making it one of the largest producers of flour in the country.
Of the wheat it processes, 90pc is imported from the US, Canada and Australia and 10pc comes from the domestic market.
Australia supplies about 10-16pc of Nisshin's wheat requirements each year.
The impressive 10 hectare Nisshin production facility encompasses a ship to product distribution supply chain.
Its plants sits next to a private berth that has the capacity to accommodate vessels carrying more than 50,000 tonnes of wheat.
Grain is able to be unloaded at the berth at a rate of 800 tonnes an hour with the wheat conveyed to a significant silo storage facility that has the capacity to store 130,700 tonnes.
The milling facility itself is state-of-the art with seven units that are capable of producing 1500t of flour a day.
Two of the main talking points among growers touring the Nisshin facility were how impeccably clean the production area was and the super efficient automated pallet racking storage facility.
Flour produced at the Nisshin plant is usually packed into 25kg bags and after passing a final inspection is loaded into the fully automated rack warehouse for storage.
The storage facility has the capacity to store 504,400 bags of flour or the equivalent of 50 million loaves of bread.
In terms of flour production there are three main basic processes:
Milling - the hard wheat kernels are opened up and the endosperm scraped out
Sifting - ground particles are sifted and graded by size through a series of 20-30 sieves
Purification - this is where the tiny pieces of bran are removed from the flour.
All three processes are carefully co-ordinated at the Nisshin plant to produce flour with the endosperm finely ground on roller mills, which is repeated over several stages with flour produced each time in a process known as gradual reduction.
Out of one tonne of wheat, 70pc of it becomes flour with the remaining 30pc used for livestock feed.
Included in its production facility and in line with the Japanese focus on food safety and quality, the Nisshin plant also has a large quality assurance and research facility.
Properties of produced flour, such as moisture, ash and protein content are analysed constantly and, in addition to this, sensory analysis is made on breads and noodles made from Nisshin flour.
The company has an in-house bakery and kitchen where these products are made and tasted in order to evaluate the flavour, aroma, colour and texture.
The Nisshin flour mill runs 24 hours a day and produces 250 brands of flour for both industrial and household use within Japan.
Customers include bakeries, confectionary makers and noodle manufacturers.
It uses a variety of different wheat with hard wheats used for bread, soft wheat from the US for cake and cookies, durum wheat for pasta and the semi-hard wheat for making Udon noodles supplied exclusively from Western Australia.
Nisshin Flour Mill general manager Seiichiro Takahasi said the company was satisfied with Australian wheat, saying it had a "consistent, high quality".
Nisshin operations group manager Toshiaki Yokoyama said Western Australia produced the best wheat for Udon noodle.
"We would like to see you continue to focus on making good quality ASW for noodles," Mr Yokoyama said.
"We can't source this type of wheat from anywhere else in the world."
Mr Yokoyoma said they were also carrying out research to look at potentially using ASW for products other than noodles.
"We may use it for making a French-type of bread and so we are mixing it with other types of flour to see if it has the potential to make that bread or other products," he said.
