The Mill
Where paddy becomes cargo.
Basmati is not made in the field alone. Between the harvest and the container there are months of patience and minutes of precision, and both are engineering problems. This is how ours is built.
Capacity
The plant at a glance
Capacity means little without the ability to hold one specification across every shift of it. These are the figures a delivery schedule is built from.
- MT per hour milling
- 11MT per hour milling
- Dryers on the line
- 3Dryers on the line
- Paddy to finished rice, 15–18 hours typical
- 15 hrsPaddy to finished rice, 15–18 hours typical
- Graders for full-length grain
- 4Graders for full-length grain
The Process
From paddy to port, in detail
The homepage gives this in five lines. Here is what happens inside each of them.
- 01
Intake & grading
Every truck is sampled before it is tipped. Moisture, admixture, immature grain, foreign matter and the smell of the paddy are read at the gate, and a lot that misses the intake band is turned away rather than blended down. The lot number written here is the one that ends up on the container.
- 02
Drying & storage
Paddy arrives wet from the field and has to come down to a storage-safe moisture without shocking the grain. Dried too fast, the endosperm fissures and the grain breaks in the mill months later, long after anyone would think to blame the dryer. We step the moisture down in stages and rest the lot between passes.
- 03
Steam-maturation
Maturation is the whole argument for premium Basmati, and we've built a faster, more consistent way to get there. Paddy is steamed under controlled conditions in our own boilers, then dried and rotated before its final milling pass — the texture, aroma and elongation buyers expect from a well-aged grain, achieved in a controlled process at our own mill rather than months in a warehouse. Paddy to finished rice: 15 to 18 hours, start to finish.
- 04
Milling & polishing
Rubber-roll shelling takes the husk off with minimal contact, then whitening and silky polishing are taken in gentle successive passes rather than one aggressive cut. Every pass is a chance to snap an 8.35 mm grain, and breakage is the one defect that cannot be sorted back out afterwards.
- 05
Sortex & grading
Length graders separate whole grain from broken. Optical sorters read each grain against the lot standard and eject the discoloured, the chalky and the black-tipped. Rejects are re-run rather than written off, and the accepted stream is re-sampled before it reaches the packing line.
- 06
Packing & stuffing
Packing runs against the buyer's approved artwork and destination labelling. Containers are checked for taint and damp, lined where the route calls for it, and sealed with the seal number recorded on the shipping documents.
The Long Game
Storage and steam-maturation
We don't age paddy for months in a warehouse. Steam treatment in our own boilers does the same work — shedding free moisture, reorganising the starch, concentrating the aroma — in hours rather than seasons, before drying, rotating and a final milling pass.
Paddy is held across two godowns and one open shed before it reaches the line, and stock rotates strictly by intake order, never by convenience.
The Line
Machinery & traceability
Sortex and length grading
A dedicated sortex colour-sorter and a four-stage length-grading process work in sequence to isolate only whole, unbroken grains — the standard every premium batch has to clear before it's packed.
Traceability
The lot number written at the intake gate travels with the grain. It survives drying, steam-maturation, milling and packing; it is printed on the bag and recorded against the container seal. When a buyer calls about one bag, we can trace it back to the intake lot it came from and the week it was milled.