California Heritage Mills Chooses Cgrain Value for Quality Improvement

In 2010 a local group of farmers in the California area wanted a more active role in the rice they take great pride in growing and built a storage and drying facility in Maxwell, CA.  It did not take long for the next logical step to build a rice mill.  This is how California Heritage Mills (CHM) became a fully integrated business model from the farm, to storage and drying, to full packaging and direct sales to customers.

Director of Operations, Chris Davis has been involved in the rice industry for over 30 years and has seen many changes.  When the Cgrain Value in 2023 was selected to work with the USDA in grading medium grain rice for whole and broken kernels, he and others within the industry flew to Kansas City, MO and visited the laboratory where two instruments were being used.  He instantly saw the potential of the instrument being able to grade quality parameters within his rice mill at CHM.

The justification to purchase was the automation of being able to analyze for common defects in the rice they were milling, at the time only done by manual grading.  Since a model did not exist for all of these parameters, CHM took it upon themselves to  develop the model for these quality traits together with TA Scientific (TAS), and Cgrain AB.  This was done by collecting rice samples that have been graded from their facility and sent to be collected on a Cgrain Value Instrument at TAS prior to purchasing.  In October of 2023, CHM purchased the first Cgrain Value instrument for the purpose of giving them a tool to monitor the quality of rice they produced.

Within a few weeks of the instrument being installed, comparisons began between their graders and the initial Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model.  The ANN model compared very well with their current graders and additional samples were collected during the 2023 harvest and extensive comparisons continued.  Collected samples were analyzed on the Cgrain Value, their own internal graders, and a FGIS official site in California.  The confidence they gained from these comparisons have given them a tool that is not only used for broken and whole kernels, but also thirteen other parameters as well.  This allows their operators to have an objective, automated tool to help do their tasks at hand.

In today’s market there are many challenges.  They include the cost of labor, training new hires on how to grade rice, and making their employees more productive.  The Cgrain Value has given them the opportunity to take a manual task that was only being done by trained operators, and allowed that process to be automated at significant savings.  We are very pleased to have partnered with California Hertiage Mills to bring the latest imaging analysis to the rice market.