Mühlenchemie is pushing ahead with the specific focussing of its brands with Peter Steiner as the new Global Head of Business Unit. By doing so, the specialist in flour improvement will be taking a further organizational step into the future. Peter Steiner contributes over thirty years of experience in the international functional ingredients industry. His task will be to structure and gear Mühlenchemie’s services even more closely to its customers’ needs in a volatile and globalized market. The focus of his work will be on extending consultancy and digitalizing the company’s offers.
As Dr. Matthias Moser, the managing director responsible for the firms and brands of the Food Ingredients Division of the Stern-Wywiol Gruppe, explains: “With Peter Steiner we have acquired a wealth of know-how for Mühlenchemie in respect of strategy, change management and team formation. By perfecting these competences we are raising our philosophy of ‘Understanding Flour’ onto a new level.
Every year, Mühlenchemie standardizes more than 100 million tonnes of wheat for the milling industry in over 130 countries. The requirement for this has always been to maintain close relations with over 2,000 customers and develop tailor-made solutions. Teams of experts in Mexico, Singapore, India, China, Russia, Turkey and Nigeria offer services to the local mills on the spot, thus helping them to achieve optimal flour quality.
“We intend to preserve and develop the values that have made our company the global market leader in flour treatment and apply them to meet the demands of our time”: this is how Peter Steiner describes his objectives. To do so, Mühlenchemie will take on additional personnel and also adjust itself more closely to the culture of the target markets with new employees in product management. “We want to understand our customers better, encourage internal and external communication and offer more personal consultancy. That will also mean more investment in business development, trend scouting and market research. We must think in terms of whole strategies so that the mills can achieve growth in a dynamic market environment”, Steiner says.
Peter Steiner goes on to explain what this means in concrete terms: “We will collect, analyze and share more data-driven information from the start, from the raw materials and procurement markets, in order to find more individual and quicker solutions for our customers.” The focus of development will still be the group’s SternTechnology Center in Ahrensburg, near Hamburg. The trial bakery enables 100 research scientists and applications technologists to simulate processes and test the efficacy of enzymes and other active ingredients. From the cereal grain to the baked goods, the company can represent all stages of production with the use of sophisticated technology. Within a short time, the results can be applied to commercial processing and conveyed into the target regions.