Collection: Petra Flours

Petra® flours are the state-of-the-art expression of an Italian family of millers who have gradually combined, like no one else, the quality of craftsmanship with avantgarde technology to transfer the inestimable energy of wheat grains to the table.

 

Molino Quaglia is a family business that from 1914 has milled only the finest grains.

At the age of 13, Angelo Quaglia, the founder of today's mill, left his family who had been millers since 1856, to start a small stone-grinding mill built on rafts moved by the waters of the river Adige. Then, in 1937, he moved from the river to dry land, at Vighizzolo d d'Este (near Padua), where the mill grew to industrial sizes (1947) under the guidance of his son Annito Quaglia.


Records and awards for the high production levels were not long in coming, and in 1986, it became the first Italian mill to build a plant to roast cereals, Instead, in 1996, it was the first in Italy to obtain ISO 9002 quality certification, and only two years later, was recognized as the most advanced in the 4,000q/24h production band. It was one of the first mills in Italy to obtain the coveted BRC quality certification.


Since 1989, the company has been run by the three siblings Lucio, Chiara and Andrea Quaglia.

It is currently the only industrial-sized Italian mill to have developed a modern stone-grinding process that uses the most advanced technologies for cleaning the grain of foreign bodies, weeds and mycotoxins, in a production environment that protects the flour from external contamination, all the way from the millstone to the sack.

Meanwhile, Molino Quaglia's new stone grinding wheels see only common wheat grown in Italy with a short supply chain that helps both the environment and the consumer: integrated agriculture techniques, preservation using the cold technique instead of insecticides, thorough cleaning of the silos that store the wheat and flour, and Italy's only state-of-the-art optical sorter to guarantee traceability from field to fork and the maximum food safety achievable today

Among the unique features of Molino Quaglia is the "fabbrichetta" (little factory) for toasting bran and wheat germ and, since 2013, a plant for the germination and assisted fermentation of cereals and pulses in a mother yeast culture, which boasts a patent that is exclusive in Europe. 

Then an adjacent progressive milling plant with cast-iron cylinders that is the most advanced in Italy, where the wheat, personally selected year after year wherever the climate offers the highest quality, is transformed into fine flours for professionals of bread, pizza and pastry making, and cooking in general.

The expressions of a family of millers who have gradually combined, like no one else, the quality of craftsmanship with state-of-the-art technology that helps transfer the inestimable energy of wheat grains to the table.

However, flour from the mill amounts to nothing if the tradition of how to use it best becomes lost. The old Molino Quaglia building, no longer home to millstones, was given new life in 2002 as a school known as "Il Laboratorio®", which, with its 5 storeys kitted out for production and multimedia teaching, has now become the largest, most complete business school inside an Italian mill, where it is possible to learn the “white art” in the very place where the main ingredient of our diet comes from, and, at the same time, management and sales techniques to make your own company successful. Il Laboratorio® gave birth to the projects Università della Pizza®, Accademia del Pane®, PizzaUp® and Pasticceria Dinamica®.

And, to publicize our daily work, the development of non-stop marketing and communication that know no equal in Italy's milling sector. A complex, highly innovative activity which in just a few years, thanks to the Petra® flours, has given flour a "face", dusting away the ashes of anonymity that had covered it in the post-war years of prosperity.

Day in day out, Molino Quaglia works to demonstrate that good flavour and technology can bring today's consumers the flavours of yesteryear with the nutritional balance and food safety demanded by contemporary living.