Kerala millers team up to set up rice bran oil plant

Rice millers of Kerala are gearing up to meet the increasing demand for rice bran oil. A consortium, called Kalady Rice Millers Consortium (KRMC), with a membership of 39 rice millers, has started a rice bran oil extraction plant at Kalady near Kochi.

N P Antony, managing director, KRMC, said the demand for rice bran oil is on the increase not only in the domestic market but also overseas. Rice bran oil, which is traditionally used as edible oil in paady growing states, has the property to control cholesterol level in human body.

The new plant, with an installed capacity of 20 tonne daily, has been established with a total cost of Rs 3.5 crore. The plant is the first of its kind in Kerala and has been constructed with financial aid of the central government under the 'cluster development programme'.

He said that rice bran needed for the plant would be collected from 70 rice mills in and around Kalady. The consortium plans to export 30 per cent of its total production and are in discussions with Gulf countries, Europe, China and Japan for selling their product.

In order to maintain quality, KRMC has imported machinery for the plant from Japan and Germany.

He said that the oil would double filtered and marketed in packets of 0.5 kg and 1 kg. The retail pricing will be between Rs 40-45 a kg which is less than coconut oil by Rs 5-10 a kg.

There will also be 50 kg packs for commercial application. Kerala has around 200 rice mills of which 140 have state-of-the-art machinery.

The mills process paddy to the tune of 1 million tonne every year procured from Kerala Tamilndu and Karnataka.

KRMC is also in the process of producing value added products such as rice flakes, falvoured flakes, rice powder, puffed rice, de-oiled rice bran and rice husk ash-sylica.

It has also planned to produce very specialized rice products such as rice orisinol which costs $800 a kg in the global market and rice lesithinol which costs $6,000 a kg by which the price of ready to eat rice can be reduced to the level of Rs 3 a kg.

Antony told Business Standard that efforts are also on for generating electricity with the use of rice husk.

Faster rice cooking devises will also be introduced in the market soon. Life saving drug components can also be extracted from rice husk and rice bran.

He said that India being the second largest producer of paddy in the world can tap the market of value added products and thereby reduce the cost of rice as staple food considerably.

KRMC will soon set up an integrated factory complex for value added rice by-products at Kalady.