Revolution in Bread:

...Accordingly, Smith installed huge blowers in his mill, the effect being to keep the temperature of the rollers and the grist below 80 degrees Fahrenheit...

...Eminent nutritionists had analyzed Brown's product, proved that it contained all the germ, and verified the inventor's even more revolutionary claim that his wheat-germ flour did not rancidify, that in fact it kept better, if anything, than ordinary bleached white flour...

...Other bakers adopted the product...

...Brown investigated a report that a small mill in Morris...

...They had only indifferent success, however, and then only during the winter months...

...Dan H. Brown, the inventor, is a former Hearst circulation executive by profession, but has milling in his blood...

...Since the substitution of Brown's wheat-germ flour in this formula results in an appreciable improvement of flavor, as shown by consumer tests in Ithaca and elsewhere, bakers of the Cornell formula are likely to be among the pioneers in the adoption of wheat-germ flour...

...Since the Brown process can be readily adapted to the milling of other grains besides wheat, it will make possible the return to human consumption of other nutritionally valuable cereal germs, especially the huge quantities of corn germ now used chiefly for animal feeds...

...Brown's process was demonstrated successfully as early as 1939...

...He also made certain adjustments in the position of the rollers...

...Although the Brown process is at present the only one which makes possible the production of non-rancidifying white flour, other processes have been developed for milling whole-wheat flour which has similar characteristics with respect to resistance to rancidification and spoilage...

...There are now over a hundred of these bakers, with a daily production of over a million loaves...

...By the autumn of 1955, the landslide was on...

...Among these experts were representatives of Amtorg, the Soviet trade agency, who tried persistently to acquire exclusive rights to it...

...Since Brown's flour does not need the amount of synthetic enrichment provided by the standard enrichment formula, general adoption of the process is likely to result in some modification of the formula, to which many nutritionists have objected from the beginning, as well as changes in the Food and Drug Administration's standards of identity for white bread and enriched white bread...

...Other beneficiaries of the Fund are the Shrine Hospitals, the Psi Upsilon Fraternity, and the Roman Catholic Church, which investigated Brown's process some years ago and has since given it consistent support...

...Illinois was processing wheat-germ flour successfully...

...Quartermaster Depot in Chicago showed that Brown's flour was superior nutritionally to the enriched flour which the armed services were then using...

...Yet, it was not until 1955 that the milling and baking industries of America and of the world began moving toward general adoption of the new process first used by the Brown Milling Corporation...

...But when, after a brief run, Smith examined the millstream...

...Brown made his first patent application and three years later was granted United States patents...

...By the spring of 1955, the groundwork had been laid for general acceptance of the Brown process by a dozen small bakers in the Chicago area who had doubled and tripled their white-bread sales after adopting Brown's wheat-germ flour...

...Their adoption by the large-volume chain bakers may be expected eventually to supply the American consumer with better bread, both white and whole-wheat, at no greater cost than the much inferior enriched and unenriched white loaves which the new processes will displace...

...the cooling process had splintered and pulverized the germ and distributed it throughout the millstream...

...The two largest advertising companies in the world were busy preparing national newspaper, magazine, radio and television campaigns in behalf of the new process, and its general adoption here and abroad seemed practically assured...

...Carlson and his associates reported that Brown's wheat-germ flour contained two-and-a-half to three times as much thiamin as standard unenriched white flour, and that it was 20 to 25 per cent higher in fat content, although no rancidity developed after a year of storage at room temperatures...

...He found that the millers themselves were not sure what had happened or why...

...During the 1880s, Hedges spent a half million dollars in a vain attempt to mill wheat-germ flour...

...REVOLUTION IN BREAD A new milling process makes it possible to produce an enriched, better-tasting loaf at no increase in cost By James Rorty Almost two decades ago, a technological breakthrough solved the two principal problems--nutritional debasement and spoilage--which had haunted the milling and baking industries since the 1890s and had contributed to a decline in per-capita consumption of bread in America...

...The customers bought 20 per cent more of the bread made with wheat-germ flour than they had been buying of the ordinary white loaf: also, they clamored to know what had improved the quality of the company's product...

...The Cornell formula was first adopted by the consumer cooperative stores and christened "Triple Rich...

...In 1941, when the wartime flour-and bread-enrichment program was adopted, a revolutionary advance in milling technology had already provided an adequate and inexpensive solution for the problem of nutritional deficiencies created by the general use of bread made with de-germinated and bleached white flour--a problem that the flour- and bread-enrichment program, now mandatory in most states, solved inadequately and expensively...

...It may even lead to the abandonment of the flour- and bread-enrichment program in favor of high-extraction white or near-white wheat flours, reinforced in the bread mix by natural food supplements such as food yeast, defatted milk solids, and soy flour...

...During a visit to France, one of the original owners of the mill, a man named Frank Smith, had conceived what he believed to be a brilliant idea: that by making relatively minor changes in the standard steel-roller milling process, he could get not only flour but a valuable by-producl in the form of ergot, a fungus infestation useful in medicine...

...His repeated failures, coupled with other equally unsuccessful attempts by leading milling companies, convinced the industry that it couldn't be done...

...The Fund will receive and distribute 40 per cent of the royalties from Brown's patents...

...Realizing that they might be on the track of an important technological discovery, the Morris millers attempted to repeat the accident that had given them wheat-germ flour...

...After he acquired ownership of the mill, Brown devoted the next several years to developing his own process for milling wheat-germ flour dependably...

...A dozen specialty bakers had used the flour to make bread so superior in flavor that it not only outsold ordinary white bread, but stepped up the consumers' per-capita bread consumption...

...It is now established that wheat-germ oil contains androgens and estrogens--he male and female sex hormones--and gonadotropins, the pituitary hormone that stimulates the sex hormones...

...This form of white-bread improvement was strongly urged in 1941 at the National Nutrition Conference for Defense by a group of distinguished American nutritionists and was subsequently developed by Dr...

...Two years before this, the Reader's Digest, in its January 1940 issue, had told the substance of the inventor's story, after which milling and baking experts from all over the world swarmed into the little town of Morris to witness demonstrations of the process...

...Recent research findings have emphasized the nutritional importance of the cereal germs...

...Like so many major inventions, the discovery of the Brown process was largely accidental...

...Something quite unanticipated had happened...

...That was the first surprise...

...Portions of the oily wheat germ, which is softened by the heat of the ordinary roller-mill process and sifted out as a small pellet along with other "mill offals," were found in the white flour...

...Illinois mill...

...when his product was tested successfully by Dr...

...Anton J. Carlson, emeritus professor of physiology at the University of Chicago...

...Its product, a creamy white flour retaining all the germ and part of the endocrine layer of the wheat berry, with their rich concentration of vitamins, minerals and proteins, closely approximated the nutritional value of the 80- to 85-per-cent-extraction wheat meal on which Great Britain based her successful wartime nutritional program...

...they are to participate equally in a scholarship program to be administered by the Daniel T. Hedges Memorial Fund, which Brown has established in memory of his grandfather...

...A lively competition began for the purchase of foreign rights...

...In 1942, tests made by the U.S...

...hence, the chemical agents used to preserve, whiten and condition flour, all of which cause some destruction of vitamin values, are needless...

...Repeated tests by cereal technologists, including the W. E. Long Company, leading research consultant for the milling and baking industries, have shown that the flour made by the Brown process resists rancidification amazingly...

...Give M. McCay of Cornell...

...Among the beneficiaries of the patent rights are 4-H Club members and the sons of American Legion veterans...

...It could make flour bleaching obsolete...

...It contained 2 per cent wheat germ, 6 per cent high-fat soy flour, and 8 per cent defatted milk solids, the wheat germ being supplied by the addition of extracted wheat germ to unbleached white flour...

...To supply the zooming demand for wheat-germ flour...

...he promptly forgot about ergot...

...General adoption of the Brown process by the milling and baking industries is likely to have far-reaching conesquences...

...In 1947...

...Army nutritionists had verified all these claims...

...He now holds patents in some thirty countries, with applications pending in six others...

...Subsequently, the company gave them the facts in a small advertising campaign which stepped up wheat-germ bread sales by almost another 20 per cent...

...At that time, this improved milling process had been in successful operation for at least three years at the Brown Corporation's Morris...

...His grandfather was Daniel T. Hedges, a well-known Iowa banker and flour-mill owner...

...The second came when it was discovered that samples of the germ-infested white flour didn't spoil, even after they had been kept around the mill for many months at summer temperatures...

...At that point, officials of the Big Five national baking chains overruled the protests of skeptical directors and decided to try out Brown's product without advertising or other sales promotion, in a small Southern city...

...In the 1930s...

...Brown doubled the capacity of his Morris mill and licensed three large milling companies to convert their mills to the Brown process...