Our Facility
The PIRMI Facilities
Pacific International Rice Mills is proud to introduce our newly renovated facilities to consumers around the world. Renovated in 2008, millions of dollars were invested to improve the efficiency, productivity, and quality of both the mills and finished rice products. PIRMI’s operations have been retrofit and rebuilt with brand new machinery, assemblies, and storage for the creation of an even better product.
The facilities at PIRMI are built to accommodate the great quantity of raw rice continually received, processed, and shipped from the mill. Physical operations include the following:
- Five storage and handling elevators
- Two grain dryers
- Five long-term, flat-storage warehouses
- Short-term silos and storage facilities
- Primary milling machinery
- Sake milling machinery
- Packaging operations
- Shipping operations
- By-product processing equipment
- State of the art technology
Centrally located in a rice-growing region of California, PIRMI purchases raw materials directly from local rice producers as part of an eco-friendly production process.
The Milling Process
PIRMI ensures the quality of our products with a thorough and precise milling process:
- Pre-cleaning – Undesired foreign material is removed by density separation.
- Shelling – A rubber roll assembly shears off the hull layer of the rice.
- Paddy Separation – Rough, unshelled rice (paddy rice) is removed from the brown rice.
- Milling – Four separate mills remove bran and preserve the starch yield of each grain of rice.
- Grading (Size Separation) – Rice is sifted and separated through screens and indented cylinders.
- Color Sorting – Paddy, stones, dark seeds, and defective grains are removed. State-of-the-art NIR cameras can distinguish between rice and foreign particles such as rocks and glass.
- Storage – Sorted rice is dried and stored at optimal conditions for long- or short-term storage.
- Shipping – Packaged rice products are shipped by rail and truck to consumers everywhere.