The Cereal Experts

Limagrain Céréales Ingrédients (LCI), is unique in that it is the only ingredients company owned by a plant breeder. The Marketing Manager for Bakery at LCI, describes the company’s position and plans.

LCI is part of Groupe Limagrain, an international farmer-owned cooperative, based in the Auvergne region of France, and the EU’s largest plant breeder. LCI claims a unique feedback process of working closely with their own breeders in producing new varieties that are suited to different food ingredient applications.

Our uniqueness come from the fact that, as part of Europe’s largest plant breeder, we understand our cereal raw materials and how they behave in our customers’ industrial processes – we work with wheat everyday. Our cereals experts can provide not only innovation, but also the opportunity to tell the full story of our products, going back to the fields of our cooperative farmer members where they originate. The feedback loop is closed by LCI customers stating their requirements – and these go back to us and, hence, directly to our plant breeders working on the next generation of varieties.

LCI believes ‘natural’, ‘authentic’, ‘no preservatives’ and ‘no additives’ are all concepts that announce the return of less processed, simpler, wholesome products. Today, the industrial bakers of the world need to adopt the ‘clean label attitude’ while remaining economically competitive and keeping the functionality of their recipes.

For more than 30 years, LCI has been offering the milling and bakery industries products at the forefront of innovation in functional flours, enzymatic preparations, improvers, correctors, bread mixes and premixes. Our dafa and westhove ranges are complementary: not only can they improve the behaviour of dough and the texture of products, but also act as fat reducers, flavour and colour enhancers and bring the authentic, nutritional and functional benefits of cereals to manufactured products. Today, 80 per cent of our bakery range is ‘clean label’.

To help customers make the best adjustments to recipes, LCI’s analytical laboratory identifies the functionalities of all their ingredients so that they can understand and control how they integrate with flours according to their processes. Their bakers then conduct bread making tests by recreating customers’ actual production conditions using the pilot plant.
Another theme that comes up again and again at LCI is the importance of research and constant improvement.

Research is our lifeblood – 14 per cent of the group’s turnover is devoted to this investment which assures our competitiveness, enhances our unique understanding of cereals, and contributes to meeting the agricultural and food challenges of the 21st century. We are constantly looking for innovation in our products – from the field to the mill and from research to production – demonstrating our unique expertise in cereals that expresses the character and image of our company.

To focus on the 14 per cent that goes on research, LCI’s research centre has the ability to combine the agricultural and environmental needs of farmers, the technology requirements and desires of industry and the nutritional and taste demands of consumers. It is called ULICE (Unité de Laboratoires pour l’Innovation dans les Céréales – Laboratory Unit for Cereal Innovation) and has the objective of adding value to cereals by co-ordinating the selection of new varieties of wheat and maize for use in the food industry.

This requires expertise at pre-manufacture in cereal variety selection, and combining this expertise with a knowledge of food manufacturing processes and their constraints.

ULICE is structured around a number of research areas. The Raw Materials Unit works on improving production processes, with the collection and batching of cereals to guarantee quality through to the processing phase. The Functional Cereal Ingredient Unit co-ordinates the selection of varieties, mainly wheat or maize, based on precise functionalities. The development of a cereal ingredient from a specific variety must satisfy a number of requirements: the consumer benefit (nutritional or organoleptic), industrial constraints (shearing, freezing, etc) and the agronomic value of the variety used.
The Test Laboratory works for the Raw materials and Cereal ingredients Units described above, and also for the Bread Making Unit. So, if a problem occurs on a production line – perhaps a variation in machinability or in moisture content – the Test Laboratory is able to put in place a test plan, or to develop a specific test protocol to find the relevant analytical parameters.

The results obtained facilitate production monitoring and the selection of raw materials through increased understanding of the issues. In short, a productivity gain for the LCI’s customer – the manufacturer.

Turning to applications of the company’s philosophy and the investment in research, an example we have a recent product that is a perfect example of the link between the plant breeding and ingredients sides.

AbsoluteWHEAT is produced from specially-selected white wheat varieties from the breeding programme of LCI’s parent, Groupe Limagrain, underlining the value of the seed breeding pedigree and giving the product a unique background  and full traceability.

AbsoluteWHEAT is a concentrate of white wheat that has nutritional benefits, is clean label, has taste and colour benefits, and is easy to use. It is available for the bakery market: in bread, for precooked loaves or baguettes, for whole wheat crepes, for croissants, and for breadcrumbs.  

It is also suitable for pasta, biscuit and breakfast cereals. It is a true concentrate of the nutrients in wheat – including minerals, vitamins and fibre – and has a big plus in taste and colour. Because it comes from white wheats, the ingredient has an attractive light colour, also the product has a reduction in the bitterness that can be found with standard wheats.

A final theme at LCI is that natural recipes need not cost more – replacing additives or reducing the list of ingredients presents a challenge for the bread making industry – but putting solutions into practice need not cost more. While additives currently form an integral part of the baking industry, the objective of manufacturers is to meet the growing expectation of customers for more natural products, and they must therefore adopt the ‘clean label attitude’ while maintaining the functional aspects of their ingredients.  

However, cutting down the list of ingredients by eliminating additives isn’t always a simple task as these substances have highly effective functional properties that are sometimes difficult to reproduce.  To this end, LCI make a wide range of functional flours, with high-performance properties (eg texturation, reproducing the effects of modified starch and reduction of fat) for a wide array of applications. Combining these functional flours with the other baking ingredients produces cost-effective alternative solutions to additives, allowing manufacturers to label products ‘clean label’.

Our literature features the phrase ‘The Cereal Experts’ and we truly believe that this is the case. LCI is constantly developing new ways of adding value – from the seed to the finished product – to fulfill the needs of our customers and consumers alike, whilst offering the farmer members of our cooperative a market for their high value crops.

This philosophy covers our complete ingredient range – from bakery as discussed above – to our ingredients for the snack, breakfast cereal and convenience foods markets, as well as our non-food bioplastics products.