Millets

Pearl, foxtail, finger & the minor millets

Millet is not one commodity, and treating it as one is how buyers end up with the wrong grain. Pearl millet (bajra) is the volume species — grey-green, bold seed, moving into flour milling, roti and flatbread manufacture, brewing and, in large tonnage, the bird-seed and feed trade, which is a genuinely different buyer paying a genuinely different price. Foxtail millet is the small golden grain the health-food and ready-to-cook rice-substitute trade wants, sold hulled and increasingly on a low-glycaemic-index story. Finger millet (ragi) is the reddish-brown grain milled into ragi flour for South Indian and East African staples and, separately, for infant-food manufacture, where the specification tightens sharply on aflatoxin and microbiological load. Kodo, little, barnyard and proso millet fill out the minor-millet basket for the same health-food channel, usually bought hulled and blended.

So the first question on any millet enquiry is species and form, not price. Whole millet for feed and bird-seed is bought on purity, admixture and test weight; hulled millet for human food is bought on hulling yield, broken percentage and colour, and prices well above it. Buyers come to millets rather than to sorghum or wheat when they need a gluten-free grain with a health-positioning story, and to bajra specifically when they need volume starch and a feed-economic price. Lots are machine-cleaned, destoned, gravity-separated and Sortex colour-sorted, certified by SGS or Intertek for species, purity, moisture, foreign matter, broken grain, aflatoxin and crop year, with phytosanitary and fumigation documentation. CBIL arranges 25kg and 50kg PP bags and 1 MT jumbo bags, container-load, on FOB, CFR and CIF terms.