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PIP COURTNEY, PRESENTER - 10/05/2014: Food processing in Australia is a tough business and it often seems that only the biggest survive. So it's always encouraging to hear a success story of someone starting small and prospering.
From country Victoria, Chris Clark has the tale of three brothers making their mark in their own unique way.
CHRIS CLARK, REPORTER: A fresh autumn morning half an hour west of Mildura and it's all go at Grewal Farms. There's flour to be milled, product to be packed and shipped. And now the baking heat of summer's gone it's time to harvest the almonds.
Grewal Farms is the story of three brothers who've shifted continents and cultures in their determination to carve out a life on the land.
Agyakar, Kamaljit and Manjinder Grewal are Sikhs from Punjab who left their home in India looking for bigger and better opportunities.
MANJINDER GREWAL, GREWAL FARMS: We came from northwest of India. Sort of right on the border with Pakistan. That is also a cropping country. We are farmers for generations and that's all the ancestors have done.
I suppose it was in the blood. When we came to Australia that's what we wanted to do.
CHRIS CLARK: This is a family business in the truest sense of the term.
KAMALJIT GREWAL, GREWAL FARMS: Agyakar, he's the processing manager here. He look after all the processing facilities. And then Manjinder, he goes for the marketing and then I have to keep all bookwork and source the raw materials.
CHRIS CLARK: All up, there are now 11 employees and several strands to the business.
MANJINDER GREWAL: Originally we started in Renmark with the wine grapes. Then we bought another property and pulled all the wine grapes out and planted to fresh fruit, which is nectarines and peaches.
In 2005, we bought this property, which had 70 acres of almonds and the rest was all broadacre. Then in 2006, we planted another 120 acres. And now, last year, we have grown bigger again and we planted 250 acres.
CHRIS CLARK: Almonds are a high input, high value crop.
MANJINDER GREWAL: We just have to keep up with the water as much as we can to get the good quality nut.
CHRIS CLARK: Harvesting almonds is a machinery lover's delight; no fewer than three stages to the process.
First, the trees are shaken to release the whole almond, whole shell and kernel intact.
MANJINDER GREWAL: We're looking for a good, round-based almond.
CHRIS CLARK: Once they're on the ground, it's time for the sweeper to come through and put them in neat rows. And then it's a case of picking them up and putting them in a bin.
They'll be hulled back at the shed, before being trucked out for further processing.
While the almonds are successful, the Grewal brothers always planned to diversify. They thought they might be wheat growers and mill their own flour. After all, back in India every small town had its own mill. It seemed only natural to them.
MANJINDER GREWAL: Since we bought this farm, we had plans to start the milling simply because we got a lot of country and we can grow our own wheat. So after we bought the property we had a severe drought. We were running short of water, was getting very scarce and very expensive. Then we - 'No, look, we have to do something.'
We sat down, all three of us, and worked out what we do next. And we went, 'OK, let's get into milling.'
CHRIS CLARK: And that's exactly what they did. With no background in milling, they bought the milling equipment they needed to start from scratch, to build the sort of mill they knew growing up in India - a stone mill. Their mill consists of four stone mills in a line.
MANJINDER GREWAL: You mill the whole wheat. What's in the wheat is in the flour.
CHRIS CLARK: Each stone mill has two stones, one above the other with a small gap between. And they have to be taken apart and resurfaced every now and again to maintain performance.
MANJINDER GREWAL: This is a top stone, which is stationary, and the bottom one spins. The grain goes into the hole.
CHRIS CLARK: Yes.
MANJINDER GREWAL: And gets under the stone.
CHRIS CLARK: And there's pressure from the other stone up on here?
MANJINDER GREWAL: Yes, and they're not touching, the stones not touching each other, they're just there; one stationary, one's going around. And here at the flat part gets milled and flour gets out with the centrifugal force.
CHRIS CLARK: Producing the sort of flour most Indian families use daily for making flat bread at home.
There are other stone millers in Australia, so the brothers knew their only real edge lay in trying to make something for a market they knew well; in this case the Indian retail flour market, which depends mostly on imports.
MANJINDER GREWAL: It's not as fine as the plain flour and it's not as coarse as the wholemeal. It's in the middle. But it's got the whole goodness of a grain.
CHRIS CLARK: Of course, it's one thing to mill the flour, another thing entirely to sell it. They mill to order. They don't hold a lot of stock. Once it's in the bag and on a pallet, then it's quickly onto the truck and off to customers.
Manjinder Grewal heads their marketing effort and he spent plenty of time door to door in the cities, trying to get their product into shops.
MANJINDER GREWAL: Very tough. Very, very tough. It was just hard.
CHRIS CLARK: How did you do it?
MANJINDER GREWAL: Oh, knocking doors, you know? Each shop.
KAMALJIT GREWAL: Spent a lot of time with the shoppers and tried to, tried to educate the people with the freshness of the product compared to the imported product. When the imported product is coming it's at least six weeks on the water and here, if we have an order today, we've got the capacity to deliver the product in Melbourne tomorrow. So within a week, this goes to the end customers, which is the main key of our marketing - the freshness and the local clean, green image of Australia. Yes. Yes.
CHRIS CLARK: As the business has grown so they've spread their wings a little further. They don't do the farming themselves, but they have a share-farming arrangement with a near neighbour who uses their land to grow a wheat crop.
KAMALJIT GREWAL: In the share-farming operation, we get somewhere around 1,000 to 1,500 tonnes and then for the milling we need another 2,000 tonnes, we buy from the local growers. So in total, we just milling about around 3,500-4,000 tonnes through the year.
CHRIS CLARK: That makes them a fairly small mill, but they've been growing at about 15 to 20 per cent a year. Most businesses would settle for that.
MANJINDER GREWAL: Five years ago, when we start milling and we start knocking on the doors from scratch and now we're doing about 3,000-plus tonnes of the product and that's over 500 retail customers.
CHRIS CLARK: Their success is going back into the business. Wheat flour's the mainstay, but they've expanded into other lines too.
MANJINDER GREWAL: We set up a new line for chickpea, maize flour and stock feed.
CHRIS CLARK: And you've brought all this gear in from India, most of it?
MANJINDER GREWAL: Yes, all the milling gear is from India and packing and stuff from China.
CHRIS CLARK: Milling chickpeas is a more complex operation than milling wheat.
KAMALJIT GREWAL: It's a lengthy sort of process. If you take the husk off, you have to pass it through a few machines and moist and grind to take the husk off and then we split it through the splitter and then we can grind it to make the flour.
CHRIS CLARK: More work, but a higher-value product than wheat flour. There's another production line to mill maize and the by-products from chickpeas and almonds supply much of the raw ingredients to make stock feed.
So what's next?
KAMALJIT GREWAL: We are looking into certified organic products and then on the marketing side, we having another two new type of flour coming on the market probably, ah...next couple of months. And one is special-made for the bakeries called bread flour, which is high in gluten, and this is still a wholemeal stone grounded. And then we're making, producing another product, which is a multigrain with seven grains in it, which is locally produced here.
CHRIS CLARK: Fresh eyes, teamwork, determination. It's not a secret formula, but their success is unusual, a happy exception to the familiar story of the big getting bigger and the small falling by the wayside.