Credited to Venezuela. Empresas Polar attributes the industrial process to its own staff (Carlos Roubicek and Juan Lorenzo Mendoza Quintero) and does not credit Caballero Mejías, whose 1954 patent it bought. Both claims place the origin in Venezuela.
How it began
Luis Caballero Mejías, a mechanical engineer from Caracas who had studied in Chile and directed the Escuela Técnica Industrial from 1935, registered Venezuelan patent 5,176 in 1954 with the Ministry of Development under the name La Arepera. It covered a dehydrated maize flour that needed only water to become dough for arepas. He set up a plant in Caracas, but few packages reached the market. In poor health, he sold the patent to Lorenzo Mendoza of Empresas Polar, and he died in Caracas in 1959.
Before it existed
Making arepa dough was labor-intensive. Maize had to be soaked, dehusked and dried, then pounded in a large mortar. One recent account says an arepa could take up to 12 hours of work, and the first advertising slogan for the industrial flour announced that the pounding was over.
How it works
In the patented process the maize kernels are peeled, cooked and dried industrially before being milled. Because the starch is already cooked, the packaged flour forms a workable dough as soon as water is added, with no further boiling or grinding. The method shortened preparation and made it possible to sell a shelf-stable packaged product.
Who pushed back
Credit for the process is contested. Empresas Polar, which launched the Harina P.A.N. brand in 1960, has attributed the idea to its brewmaster Carlos Roubicek and to Juan Lorenzo Mendoza Quintero, who used corn flake machinery at its Remavenca plant, and does not credit Caballero Mejías. Venezuelan accounts of the patent and its sale to Polar name him as the inventor.
What lasted
Harina P.A.N. was the only flour of its kind for almost fifteen years, until other firms could enter in 1974 when the original patent expired. By 1990 precooked corn flour supplied 40 percent of the cereal calories in the Venezuelan diet. Since 1993 all such flour sold in Venezuela must by decree be enriched with iron, vitamin A, thiamine, riboflavin and niacin. The product has been copied in other maize-eating countries and is sold wherever Venezuelans have migrated.
