It was a great day yesterday, out and about with Victoria, our Sales Officer, visiting the women who sell our produce on local markets. We met 11 women who all make a living by buying tomatoes and peppers wholesale from us and then selling them on in marketplaces all over Mzuzu city. Roughly half of our produce is sold like this, with the rest going to hotels, restaurants, hospital, schools, etc, on a contract basis.
We are working with the whole value chain – supporting farmers to grow high quality crops; arranging transport to our Mzuzu hub; and then finding the market to ensure minimum waste between field and fork (or polytunnel and plate in our case!)
As we look to the future, we realise that we need to gear up for higher volumes of produce and find new ways to reach the market while maintaining the high quality. Our women sellers are limited by what they can carry: they will travel up to 6km to come and pick up what they can carry, usually about 25kgs, and then they walk back to their market place and sell them there. It’s labour intensive, and they are very limited in the volumes that they can sell. We are now exploring how we could deliver larger quantities to these women so that they can concentrate on selling, rather than carrying, tomatoes! We are at the early stage of a project called Coolrun where we are working with a UK company to enable us to deliver the produce to the market in clean, cooled “pods”. Together we are designing a sales kiosk using two of these pods at each location to enable the women to have 400kgs to sell, in a clean, comfortable environment. With these much larger volumes, the women will enjoy a substantial increase in their incomes and we are able to go on growing more in the polytunnels.
The journey from polytunnel to plate can be an interesting one for our tomatoes. Some of the polytunnels are near the road but others are in remoter areas. Imagine crossing this bridge with a crate of 25kgs of tomatoes on your head!
Malawi Fruits 