World Grain - December 2008 - 43

WHAT'S NEW?

BestFlours No. 11/08

Stern Ingredients India

A new star is born
Mühlenchemie and Nensey Food Ingredients are setting up a joint venture in India. Detlev Rösler, Mühlenchemie's
Area Sales Manager, describes the establishment of our new Asian afﬁliate for BestFlours.

A population of over a billion, an annual
wheat ﬂour consumption of around 50
million tons and more than 1,000 industrial wheat mills are just a few of the impressive ﬁgures that characterize India.
With this potential in mind we started
our activities in the Indian Market over
ten years ago, together with our former
agent and present partner Nensey Food
Ingredients from the Palani Group.
The overall conditions have changed a
lot since then. The actual starting signal
for us was the reduction of import duties. That at last created the necessary
basis for selling our products at competitive prices. Consumer awareness and
purchasing power have increased greatly
with the constant expansion of the
Indian middle class. That opens up a lot
of business opportunities for industry
and makes it more and more important
to offer consumers quality products that
meet their more sophisticated requirements.
Sales have risen steadily since that time,
and I am proud to say that we are the
market leader in India in the ﬁeld of
ﬂour ingredients and now supply hundreds of satisﬁed customers with our
products and services.
But of course increasing business automatically means more special requests
from our customers; they include precise adjustment of the ﬂour quality for
regional specialities (which could hardly
be more various), improvement of the
baking properties of ﬂour in general
and individual adjustment to increasingly automated processes in the baking
industry. All this against the background
of greatly ﬂuctuating wheat qualities.
Increasing sales also involve greater logistic challenges and ultimately requests
from our customers for quick solutions.

These factors - together with the
underlying awareness of the enormous
potential for selling further products
from the Stern-Wywiol Gruppe - made
the next step forward more and more essential for us: the establishment of Stern
Ingredients India Private Limited as a
joint venture with our Indian partners.
This new Indian "Star" was presented
by Torsten Wywiol, Managing Director
of the Stern-Wywiol Gruppe, during the
Second Indian Millers Meeting in Delhi
and Coimbatore on 17th and 19th May
2008.
We have exciting times ahead of us.
We shall steadily enlarge our sales and
technology teams on a supra-regional
basis in order to ensure that we shall ultimately be present on the spot throughout India. We have taken the ﬁrst steps
already by setting up a baking laboratory,
complete with a rheological section and
a bakery. Modern production facilities
will be established, starting with the construction of a compounding plant near
Mumbai which will have several production lines and enable us to respond
quickly and ﬂexibly to our customers'
individual requirements. New markets
will be opened up for other products
from the Stern-Wywiol Gruppe such as
baking improvers, stabilizers, enzymes
and vitamin premixes - to mention just
a few.
Not least I would like to thank all those
who have made this possible: our
Indian customers for their conﬁdence
in us and their support. The staff of our
Indian partner for their hard work and
their belief in this important project.
Mühlenchemie and SternMaid for their
assistance. And not least, of course, the
management - for the new house we
intend to ﬁll with life together, guided
by our ﬁrm belief in India's prosperous
future.

Happy birthday, Stern Ingredients India!

Biren Palani (left), Managing Director
of Nensey Food Ingredients, and
Detlev Rösler (right), Area Sales Director
of Mühlenchemie lighting the Diya as a
tribute to God. It symbolizes the beginning
of prosperity, good fortune, and the start
of optimistic work.
In the background: Dr. Lutz Popper
(head of R&D at Mühlenchemie) and
Torsten Wywiol (Managing Director of
the Stern-Wywiol Gruppe).

World Grain - December 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of World Grain - December 2008