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I don't know if this is the case everywhere, but at least here in Germany: The same amount (usually 1kg) of grains - for human consumption - costs 3-10 times as much as flour. This holds at least for wheat, rye, oats.

Where did I get that information?

https://www.supermarktcheck.de allows checking prices in many different (German) stores. Here is what I found for wheat:

  • For "Weizen" (=wheat) the cheapest grains I found there is "Davert Weizen" costing 1.19€per kg, and the most expensive is "Davita Bio Kamut Khorasan Weizen" costing 3.58€ per kg.
  • For "Mehl" (=flour), which ist usually wheat flour, the cheapest I found there is "Jeden Tag Weizenmehl Typ 405" costing 0.35€ per kg.

I also checked prices for wheat grains as animal food (which do not need to be as clean, so should be cheaper) e.g. on amazon.de. The cheapest I found there was 0.83€ per kg, so it's price is still more than twice the price of the cheapest flour.

Why is that so?

Shouldn't it be cheaper than flour, since

  • the milling step can be omitted?
  • grains can be stored longer and more easily than flour? (Flour has no protection against e.g. oxygen any more since it's broken down; fats become rancid more quickly.)

Since some people want references to my claim that grains can be stored longer: Look here or here.

Kjara
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    Hi! Can you please support your statement with a reference? I am guessing that you are talking about a high quality/branded wheat product, but it is difficult to know without a reference. – Giskard Mar 08 '22 at 07:34
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    Hi @Kjara. Just a stab in the dark. But perhaps this represents the opportunity cost of not converting these grains into flour (i.e. grain might sit on the shelves longer, when otherwise it could be sold as flour). – EB3112 Mar 09 '22 at 12:04
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    I doubt that "4-10 times as much" is true. E.g. at the German retailer dm, 1 kg of organic wheat grains costs 93% more than 1 kg of organic wheat flour: https://www.dm.de/dmbio-getreide-weizen-naturland-p4058172389788.html. Taking into account that 1 kg of grains returns at most 0.79 kg of flour, the markup reduces to 53%. That's easily explained by the difference in willingness-to-pay of consumer groups targeted by whole grains and flour. – VARulle Mar 10 '22 at 15:02
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    I found a similar pattern in the UK: 500g flour at £0.39 here ... – Adam Bailey Mar 12 '22 at 13:31
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    ... and 500g wheat grains at £5.49 here. – Adam Bailey Mar 12 '22 at 13:32
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    I think to improve the basis of comparison you have to look at the price of whole-wheat flour. Regular flour has no bran and no germ so it's not directly comparable to whole grains of wheat. You seem to be suggesting grains can be stored longer but are you sure? Once the bran and germ are removed you have removed fat and protein so my guess is that there is less for microbes to digest so regular flour might be stable for longer. If whole grains perish more rapidly that would explain the higher price. – H2ONaCl Mar 13 '22 at 07:43
  • I second H2ONaCl. Moreover, who is milling his / her own flour? Most likely reasonably wealthy people with a taste for healthy foods. The average Amazon/ Waitrose / Lidl/ Aldi ... shopper will not own a mill. So you have people who are able and willing to pay, combined with longer shelf life due to less demand, more problems with storage (no need for pest control for milled white flour), the grains themselves need to look "pretty" , whereas for flour, it doesn't matter what you dump in the mill. Similar to apples (the "ugly" ones) used for cider vs fruit stands. – Alex Mar 15 '22 at 00:31
  • @Alex It doesn't matter if the buyer has a mill. Whole grains can be widely used in the kitchen without milling them: e.g. let them sprout and eat them raw, cook them in water and use like rice or inside soups, or even bake bread with them. – Kjara Mar 16 '22 at 08:53
  • Yes, but is the average person doing this. I highly doubt it. – Alex Mar 16 '22 at 08:56
  • Since the time of my comment above, I noticed a reference from @Kjara that says flour perishes faster than whole grains. My complete answer is posted below. – H2ONaCl May 22 '22 at 07:07

3 Answers3

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The following is a partial explanation.

There are valuable by-products from the milling of wheat: bran and wheat germ (see here). These by-products typically sell for a much higher price per weight than white flour. Some examples of UK prices:

Thus the profit a firm makes from milling wheat will be the excess over its costs of its income from sales of all these products. Because of the by-products, it can earn a profit while selling white flour at a lower price than would otherwise be the case.

Adam Bailey
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  • For a comparison of the whole wheat grain price and the whole wheat flour price, please see my answer. – H2ONaCl Mar 16 '22 at 23:57
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Few things come to my mind are product differentiation, price discrimination, economies of scale, vertical integration, and maybe regulations.

  • I feel because grain is more organic in a sense than flour as it is not(less) processed, there is a clear case of product differentiation, and can be marketed as such to be sold at higher prices. The firms providing grains may discriminate and charge higher prices for grain because they know consumers may be willing to pay more, because of it being differentiated by being more organic.

  • If you are a well established flour mill it is very likely you have some sort of vertical integration going on, meaning you own a farm maybe, so that you are able to provide the raw material to your mill in order to make flour, allowing you to put flour out at a lower price. Combine this with a big sized firm with economies of scale due a large production process, and you can have a lower priced product.

  • The government may consider flour to be essential component of diet, due to which its production may be subsidized or there may be price caps on it.

This is a very general Microeconomics 101 sort of answer to this question, but it is based in economic reasoning and hopefully helps.

Rumi
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  • Wikipedia says... "Organic farming is an agricultural system that uses fertilizers of organic origin such as compost manure, green manure, and bone meal and places emphasis on techniques such as crop rotation and companion planting." This means grains and flour can both be certified as organic. The flour being more processed does not make it non-organic. – H2ONaCl Mar 16 '22 at 17:16
  • @H2ONaCl Valid point, but you can still market it as less processed and more organic and differentiate it in that manner. These do not have to adhere to the exact definition of "organic" per say but are more of marketing tricks. Also generally flour is artificially enriched with minerals and vitamins, but there are consumers who would prefer the opposite. – Rumi Mar 19 '22 at 12:41
  • It's not simply a marketing choice. There is regulation governing third party certifiers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_organic_agriculture_regulation – H2ONaCl Mar 21 '22 at 18:02
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In a proper comparison grains do not cost more than flour.

Wheat kernels...

hard wheat kernels

Whole wheat flour...

hard whole wheat flour

Obviously a certain processing step has not been applied to the kernels so it should have a lower price and so it does. You posted a link to wholegrainscouncil.org which says that flour (of a type unspecified so it might be whole wheat flour or regular flour) perishes faster than kernels. That also helps to explain why flour has a higher price.

These screen shots were taken from bulkbarn.ca on 2022 March 16.

The comparison you described in your posted question is sub-optimal because you were comparing wheat kernels to regular flour which has the bran and germ removed. A better comparison is to compare kernels to whole wheat flour, which is what I have done here. Another problem is that you cited supermarktcheck.de which might draw upon prices that offer various levels of convenience such as superior packaging, convenient sizes, convenient high rent locations, and other factors. In order to compare commodities it would be better to get quotes from a bulk store which is what I have done.

H2ONaCl
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