IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF EXPORT CONSIGNMENTS OF CLASS 4 WHEAT INTENDED TO BE USED AS FOOD

Abstract

In Ukraine, the gross harvest of grain, including wheat, is growing from year to year. However, along with this, there is a steady tendency towards deterioration in the technological properties of wheat grain: the share of food grain is reduced in comparison with non-food wheat. That is why an important yet little studied issue is how to form export consignments with the use of grain which is substandard by some quality indicators. Primarily, this relates to class 4 non-food wheat grain. In the work, the changes and reproducibility of the quality indicators of consignments formed from different quantities of class 4 wheat of different quality have been studied. It has been shown that export consignments of food wheat can be formed from local batches of non-food wheat. On analysing their class-making characteristics, the quantitative and qualitative parameters have been determined for 11 samples of class 4 soft wheat (harvested in 2019) selected at enterprises of the Odessa Region, and for batches of export wheat formed from these samples by mixing. It has been shown that mixing individual local batches of wheat grain, which belong to class 4 by their quality characteristics, makes it possible to obtain export consignments of wheat conforming to the food class standards. It has been established that the more local batches are mixed, the greater are the differences between the calculated weighed average quality indicators and the experimentally obtained values of the same parameters. The class-making parameters “quantity and quality of gluten” do not always obey the law of mixing 2–4-component mixtures, and can behave in a most unpredictable way. This applies mainly to consignments formed on the basis of local batches where a lot of grains are damaged by the sunn pest. The rest of the quality parameters, though different from the calculated data, are within the tolerance limits for each parameter. It has also been shown that from non-food wheat grains (class 4), by using linear programming methods implemented in the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, one can obtain the optimal export consignments satisfying all the requirements for food wheat quality (class 3). Thus, exporting enterprises, due to the difference in prices, can receive additional profit. When a consignment is formed, the calculated quality parameters can sometimes differ from the final quality characteristics needed for the intended purpose of the export consignment. Therefore, it is not only necessary to calculate the weighed averages of the consignment quality, but also to form a test batch and experimentally determine its quality indicators in the laboratory, because some of them can deviate towards better quality as well as towards deterioration.

Keywords

• wheat grain
• quality parameters
• formation of wheat consignments
• recipe tasks