Sorghum

White food-grade & red feed-grade jowar

The whole sorghum trade turns on one fork: white versus red, which is really food versus feed. White sorghum (jowar) is the food grain — low-tannin, clean cream-white pericarp, milled into jowar flour and roti, extruded into gluten-free snacks and increasingly bought by Western food manufacturers who want a non-wheat, non-corn starch base. It is graded hard on colour uniformity and discoloured-grain percentage, because dark specks carry straight through into the flour. Red sorghum carries a coloured pericarp and higher tannin, which suppresses feed conversion in monogastrics but is fine for ruminants and is exactly what some brewers want — tannin is a flavour and haze variable, not just an anti-nutrient — so red trades as feed and brewing material at a substantially lower price. Tannin percentage is worth writing into the contract rather than assuming from colour.

Against the siblings on this page, sorghum is the volume calorie grain: buyers come to it instead of millets when they need feed economics at scale or a large-tonnage gluten-free milling base, and instead of maize when they want a drought-tolerant, non-GMO starch source. Feed compounders buy on test weight, moisture, broken and foreign matter and aflatoxin; food millers add colour, tannin and a tighter aflatoxin ceiling. Lots are machine-cleaned, destoned and gravity-separated, with Sortex colour-sorting on food-grade white, certified by SGS or Intertek for colour class, tannin, purity, moisture, test weight, broken and damaged grain, aflatoxin and crop year, plus phytosanitary and fumigation documentation. CBIL arranges 50kg PP bags, 1 MT jumbo bags and bulk-vessel supply on FOB, CFR and CIF terms.