Entrepreneur shares his experiences in the dried fruit industry

Emmanuel Ampadu is the co-founder and chief working officer of Pure and Just Food stuff, a dried fruit producer primarily based in Ghana. He spoke to James Torvaney about agribusiness opportunities and the troubles of building an export-focused enterprise in West Africa.

Inform us a bit extra about what Pure and Just Food does, and how you received started off.

Pure and Just is a … fruit processing organization that is effective with farmers across 3 locations of Ghana to generate organic and natural dried mango, papaya, banana and pineapple. We provide each domestically and overseas, beneath our own Yvaya Farm model, as properly as marketing wholesale white-labelled items.

We registered the small business in 2018 immediately after my mentor – Kwami Williams of Moringa Link – released me to Yvette Tetteh. Yvette had moved again to Ghana after learning at Stanford University in California and grew to become the co-founder and chief executive officer of Pure and Just.

Why dried fruits exclusively?

Fresh new fruit can be quite seasonal, and due to the fact it rots swiftly, farmers can see very high put up-harvest losses. Dried fruits, even so, can past substantially more time – nine months or much more.

So we saw it as an chance to develop healthier, organic, snacks, while minimizing food items waste and increasing farmers’ incomes.

There are other methods of preserving fruit, for case in point by making juice, but there were being currently a large number of factories creating juice items. Dried fruits ended up significantly a lot less typical, so there was not as substantially levels of competition.

Wherever are your prospects?

Correct now, 90% of our income are domestic, and 10% are exported. Having said that, we are operating in the direction of flipping that ratio we want the bulk of our sales to be global.

We presently provide at in excess of 20 merchants in Ghana, which include Shoprite, exactly where we have been marketing our products and solutions for three a long time.

Even so, dried fruit is still not extensively acknowledged regionally. I imagine this is switching, and the domestic market place is growing, but it will take five to 10 many years for it to be as commonplace as it is in other markets.

Internationally, we have began advertising in nations this sort of as the United States and Japan.

In what sort do you…