For the third year in a row -and there are now five awards- the best canary gofio it is ground in the Rayco Herrera Chávez mill, in Hermigua. “I’m proud of all these awards, and although I’m not looking for it, I’d like the next one to be obtained with the millet grain gofio, and if it’s local, much better”, commented the miller who, as always, dedicated the distinction to his brother Juan, who died in 2008, when he then had to take over the reins of the small mill in La Cerca and today take that gofio to the entire Canary Islands and even to the Peninsula.
“Gofio is a basic product, with great nutrients and proteins, which is already ingrained in our diet and is no longer the food of the poor, and we have to fight those American cereals and introduce our gofio in daycare centers and schools. ”, he comments.
“Our main problem today is the shortage of cereals, due to the transport strike and the war in Ukraine. It hasn’t been a very long shortage, but prices have risen and all of us millers find ourselves having the difficulty of trying to mix these cereals, even if it is to maintain the quality that is recognized in the market.”
When asked about the raw material and the abandonment of millet in Hermigua and all of La Gomera, Rayco Herrera clarifies that “our main supplier is from Andalusia, which supplies us with 200,000 kilos a year of the three main cereals, which are millet, wheat and barley. Here we see ourselves in the problem that the local grain, increasingly appreciated, from kilometer zero, is getting less and less, so I encourage you to recover those fields to obtain that local millet grain that allows us to obtain a denomination of origin. We have to find some way to promote the crop and I would settle for being able to make gofio with half the local grain”, explains the renowned miller.
The current economic crisis, with the CPI skyrocketing due to fuel prices and the shortage of Ukrainian grain, has forced Gofio Gomero to raise its prices. “In this last year, due to the rise in fuel, plastic and cereals, we have increased prices more than since we started back in 2007. We have had to make two increases, one of 15 cents and another of 10, and we continue with uncertainty”, remembering that, even so, “there are those who now take ten packages of gofio when before they took two, for fear of not finding gofio. Now things are more stabilized, but there was, shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine, an avalanche to obtain our gofio that overwhelmed us, because we were not prepared to take out more than the 800 or 1,000 kilos that we produce daily,” he says. Rayco Herrera Chavez.
