Challenges and opportunities of hard endosperm food grade maize sourced from South America to Europe

Abstract

Food grade maize dedicated to dry milling is an ingredient used in everyday foods, such as breakfast cereals, snacks, baked goods, and beer. Argentina has developed a supply chain producing high quality food grade hard endosperm maize for national and international dry milling markets. In modern times, European countries uniquely source their imported hard endosperm food grade maize from Argentina. Here we describe some of the challenges and opportunities this centralized supply chain is facing. There is a 10–30% yield gap between regular dent and hard endosperm commercial hybrids, depending on the specific genotype and environment, and we anticipate it will continue increasing. Grain quality vs. yield trade-off is the most important challenge, and to cope with this issue the supply chain is slowly adapting to use food grade hybrids with higher physical field yields but slightly lower grain hardness than traditional ones. However, there is a clear opportunity to genetically manipulate grain hardness thanks to the known role of the specific proteins involved. Another opportunity is crop management optimization at the field level. Minimum advice is given to farmers other than genotype selection, leaving them with limited decision support regarding fertilizer or plant population, two management practices with significant grain quality effects. Opportunities also arise from market development based on the nutritional characteristics of this specialty grain (such as 122% higher β-branch carotenoids, 4% lower glycemic index of cooked flours because of lower starch digestibility, and 37% higher grain Zn than softer dent germplasm), or sustainability aspects of the supply chain. We highlight the capacity to track farmers through the current use of identity preserved (IP) programs detailing where, who, and how the grain was produced or impose any needed farming practice change. All these aspects are relevant for other food chains using maize dry milling products around the globe.