Sierra Leone opened its first cocoa processing factory in a bid to bring profits from the country’s crucial industry home and improve the lives of thousands of local farmers.
The new factory’s machinery, nestled in the eastern Kenema Village, juddered to life last week in a ceremony attended by president Julius Maada Bio, who said it was a “giant step” for the country and economy.
With the capacity to process up to 4,000 tonnes of cocoa beans per year – around a quarter of the country’s annual output – Sierra Leone’s cocoa industry joins the ranks of the world’s largest cocoa producers, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, who have been crushing, roasting and grinding cocoa beans into unsweetened cocoa liquor or cocoa mass, used to manufacture chocolate, for years.
Côte d’Ivoire, which got its first industrial scale chocolate factory in 2015, today produces two million tonnes of cocoa a year, equivalent to more than 40% of the world’s market.
The new facility, built by Capitol Foods Limited, will export its semi-finished product to major cocoa produce buyers and chocolatiers in Europe for 20% more than it sold its unprocessed cocoa beans, says factory owner Hamza Hashim, CEO of Capitol Foods Limited.
While the opening represents a small victory in the continent’s fight to profit from its natural resources instead of exporting raw materials to industrialised nations, the processing plant is also about helping local cocoa farmers release the potential of their land, crops and skills, Hashim says.
“It’s more about the impact on farmers, and how it will change their lives,” he says.
Sierra Leone’s president Julius Maada Bioand Hamza Hashem inspect the finished product at Capitol Food’s Factory in Kenema VIllage.
Built as part of a $2.9m project backed by $600,000 from the Sierra Leone Agribusiness Development Fund, (SLAD) and designed to help cocoa farmers extract more value from their hard labour, the impact of the project is two-fold.
Firstly it aims to improve the crop quality and yields of some 2,800 farmers it sources its beans from by supporting farmers with better cocoa seedlings, organic crop certification, agricultural training and loans to scale their operations. Secondly the project will help farmers secure a higher price than their produce in the global cocoa marketplace, he says.
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