Milling & Baking News - September 4, 2012 - 30

Milling Technology 

The grain department of Didion Milling is located in a separate ofﬁce on the Cambria property. The company grinds 42% of the corn harvested in the three counties closest to the mill.

focus he said effectively is eliminated in Didion’s new approach. “The way it has been done in the past, a miller tests the limits of quality in terms of allowable fat or ﬁber,” Mr. Dillon said. “At certain yield (corn milled product as a percentage of corn weight) levels, you are proﬁtable. But if yield slips to less than half, you lose money. We are less concerned about mill yield, because if it isn’t used in the mill, it is used in ethanol.” And while the economics between the dry milling business and ethanol do vary (always making corn use more proﬁtable at one than the other), he said the mindset at the Cambria complex is different because one part of the kernel (the hard endosperm) is better suited for dry milled corn products and another part (the soft endosperm, closer to the germ) is better suited for ethanol. None of the company’s production goes into the hominy feed market, the traditional byproduct market for dry corn milled product. “We aim to maximize food grade product,” Mr. Didion said. “We can’t be indifferent, but we are selective. The approach is fundamentally different. Our passion is to produce the highest quality food. In the past we tried to make the most with what we had, but the ethanol plant now gives us greater ﬂexibility for food use and is a signiﬁcantly better economic use than hominy.” Because of the expanded corn utilization in connection with the ethanol
The front of Didion's ethanol plant, showcasing artwork done by an internal construction crew.
30 / September 4, 2012 Milling & Baking News

plant, the Cambria complex is one of the largest dry corn grinding operations in the United States. This added scale has the advantage of making a debranning and degerming operation viable, Mr. Didion said. “Without the ethanol plant, we would not be able to debran in the cleaning house,” Mr. Didion said. “We are grinding three times more corn than before, which allowed us to upgrade our cleaning house with this equipment. The ethanol production gives us that. Only 3% of a kernel of corn is bran (versus 14% for wheat), so smaller mills can’t afford to debran before milling. But the ethanol plant doesn’t want bran or germ. Just starch.” Milled corn products go into a wide

range of food and industrial products, Mr. Dillon said. Grits, the coarsest product in Didion’s line, are used by R.-T.-E. cereal makers, brewers and snack food companies. Corn meal goes into a variety of food products and industrial applications. Corn ﬂour has a wide range of applications, including all kinds of batters and coatings, some viscosity controlled. “It doesn’t tend to be like bread bakers where you have customers purchasing massive amounts of ﬂour,” Mr. Dillon said. “We like to say a lot of people use a little bit of milled corn.” In addition to the roster of grits, meal and ﬂour, Didion offers valueadded specialty products such as the Eclipse heat treatment process for microbial control. It can be used for corn meal coatings or ﬂavor coatings. The extraction of corn ﬁber allows users to achieve high dietary ﬁber in certain applications. The bran generally is sold to cereal companies and bar makers. “It’s a very label friendly ingredient, very natural,” Mr. Dillon said. The company also offers pregelatinized corn ﬂour, pre-cooked, which is used as a thickener in foods. Debranning and degerming also are beneﬁcial for Didion’s dried distillers grains giving the feed byproduct protein content of 40%. “The industry norm is 28%, and we can offer that too, but ours is higher with no ﬁber left in the D.D.G.’s,” Mr. Dillon said. The addition of the ethanol plant ﬁts into a broad series of objectives Didion Milling established to help advance the company in years ahead. These revolve around a range of topics, including the commitment to research and development for customer applications, new products and process improvement. While process improvement applies across the entire operation, the focus is particularly intense in the ethanol business. As a business with origins dating back far longer than a century, dry corn milling tends to experience only modest, incremental technological advances. By contrast, ethanol as an industry remains in its youth if not infancy, and productivity (ethanol yield per bu) through chemical and other advances continues to improve signiﬁcantly
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Milling & Baking News - September 4, 2012

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