DANGOTE OPENS AFRICA'S LARGEST TOMATO PRCESSING FACTORY IN KADAWA, KANO STATE

Dangote Farms Limited has officially opened its tomato factory at Kadawa in Kano State. The factory located along the expressway into Kano City has a 1200Mt daily capacity of fresh tomatoes conversion into 200Mt of paste. GEMS4, the Agency serving as intermediary between the farmers and Dangote Farms, through it Intervention Manager, Richard Ogundele, has said a daily volume of required fresh tomatoes equivalent to 40 trucks of 30Mt. At an average of 5 baskets per farmer and given capacity, 5000 farmers daily will be required to supply 25,000 baskets to the factory. 70,000 farmers in two weeks representing one production cycle will benefit from this start up operation. GEMS4 linked the Tomato Growers Association of Nigeria (TOGAN) to the factory and signed an MoU to guarantee supply to the factory. It also did a national cluster mapping of tomato production locations and based on this report, has linked clusters in 4 states out of the 12 sampled comprising of 45750 farmers to both Ikara tomato plant and Dangote combined. While Ikara is up taking 45Mt daily now and producing 4.5Mt of tomato paste, Dangote will increase output with installed capacity of 200Mt of paste. Both Ikara and Dangote will be trying to reduce the import bill of 360m USD annually spent on bringing in tomato paste from China