Flour Mills Thrakis I. Ouzounopoulos S.A. is one of the leading flour mill companies in Greece.
We started over a century ago from a small mill in Eastern Thrace run by a traditional family of millers, and grew into an advanced industrial business that has passed to the third generation of family owners, the sisters Ouzounopoulou who own more than 90% of the company.
We offer a wide range of flours for bakery and pastry applications, as well as ready-made mixes under the brand name “Innovart” and “Gold”.
Our manufacturing plant and main distribution center is located in Alexandroupolis, and the daily capacity of our mill is 300 tonnes. We sell our products all over Greece (with offices and distribution centers also in the major cities of Athens and Thessaloniki), and in the neighbouring countries of Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus and Albania.
We employ 150 people, across our production plant and our three offices and distribution centers.
Our business was founded and operates on the values of responsible sourcing to provide high-quality products, collaboration and innovation to meet client needs, and community engagement and sustainability.
Responsible sourcing to provide high-quality products
Our focus on high quality starts with careful wheat selection and responsible sourcing. The core of our wheat is derived from our local Thrace in Greece, which is rich in nutrients due to the adjoining Evros river (one of the largest rivers in Europe by discharge) and the Evros Delta. In addition, we import premium European wheat mainly from France and Germany, as well as Bulgaria.
We take great pride in our award-winning contract farming program, the first of its kind in Greece. We provide local farmers (in cooperation with the Department of Agricultural Development of the Democritus University of Thrace) with carefully selected seeds, and receive in return reliable quantities of high-quality soft wheat. This is important because the cultivation of soft wheat in Greece decreased significantly in recent decades as a result of EU subsidies for durum wheat.
Our contract farming program started in 2010 with 19 producers and 160 hectares of land, and continues today (more than ten years later) with over 780 producers that cultivate 3.650 hectares of land in the region of East Macedonia and Thrace to produce more than 15.200 tonnes of soft wheat. This soft wheat is comparable to high-quality soft wheat imported into Greece, and produces wheat flours of high purity and nutritional value.
Collaboration and innovation to meet client needs
Our employees are key to the success of our business, from our experienced millers, chemists, food technologists and bakers to our dedicated sales team. We constantly invest in our people. We are a family business, and it is important that we offer a pleasant and safe family-like working environment.
Investments related to the quality of our products, innovation and technology have always been the cornerstones of our development, enabling our company to be a leader in the Greek market. Today, we offer over 160 varieties of flour. Our highly equipped chemical laboratory provides daily monitoring throughout production stages to ensure high and stable quality. Working together with our experimental bakery, they develop new innovative products to address the growing needs of our customers. In addition, we are constantly investing in new technology and plant equipment to keep our mill modern and as efficient as possible.
Collaboration and innovation come together when we serve our clients. We view ourselves as partners to our clients. We have always been committed to manufacturing high quality products that satisfy client needs and help them prepare a wide range of tasty foods to best satisfy their customers.
Community engagement and sustainability
We nurture longstanding and mutually beneficial relationships with local farmers. Through our flagship contract farming program, we revived the ancient granary of Thrace by bringing back the local production of soft wheat. We aim to provide stable income for local rural communities and help preserve mainly small family farms. Since 2016 we have received multiple sustainability awards that recognize the positive impact of our contract farming program on the environment and on society by Bravo, a specialized initiative by a Greek Non-Profit Sustainable Development Organization.
We are committed to protecting the environment: from sourcing locally as far as possible and helping plant seeds that are adapted to the region’s climatic and soil conditions, to managing our environmental responsibilities in accordance with ISO 14001:2015 and complying with EU and national environmental legislation. We are always on the lookout for new ways to reduce our environmental footprint. For example, in 2023 we completed an investment project on solar panels to power our manufacturing plant.
We recognize that an inclusive and diverse culture brings important benefits. We believe that a diverse range of people and perspectives is a critical enabler for innovation, and we focus on enhancing diversity and inclusion at all levels. Not only is our company majority owned by two women, but also women hold senior management roles in the business. In our production plant we try to employ from the local Muslim minority of Thrace. We also value diversity in our supply chain and use commercially reasonable efforts to source from minority and women-owned businesses. A significant number of our wheat suppliers in Greece are also part of the Muslim minority of Thrace, and a high number of our wheat suppliers in Greece and Bulgaria are women.
Giving back to the community lies at the center of who we are as a company. We have been providing long-term support to those in need, through donations to NGOs, schools, foundations, ecclesiastical bodies and municipalities, giving priority to our region Thrace, one of the regions with the lowest income in Europe. By way of example, we offer flour on a regular basis to charities, including the Smile of the Child, SOS Children’s Village of Thrace, Doctors Without Borders, and we support the charity work of the Metropolitan Orthodox Church of Alexandroupolis. We also support bodies that promote the culture and traditions of Thrace, such as the History Museum of Alexandroupolis and the Ethnological Museum of Thrace.
Finally, we want to create more opportunities for the young people of Thrace and Greece. In 2023 we donated technological equipment (interactive whiteboards, projectors and computers) to schools in 4 villages of Evros in the Greek borderland. In addition, we offer scholarships to university students from Thrace and traineeships for young professionals and students on a standalone basis and together with government agency OAED.
