Nigerian
Breweries Plc, the foremost brewer in the country, has deepened its partnership
with local entrepreneurs and farmers to harness huge value chain from its
backward integration policy.
Mr. Patrick
Olowokere, the company’s Corporate Communications and Brand Public
Relations Manager, explained that the company was consolidating its local
sourcing of inputs for its operations and has fast-tracked its plan to attain
60 per cent local input sourcing to 2018 as against the initial 2020 target.
During a
tour of Psaltry International Limited, one of Nigerian Breweries’ major raw
material suppliers, in Alayide village, Ado Awaiye near Iseyin, Oyo State,
Olowokere said that the strategy was to identify organizations that could
produce raw materials and ancillary products as inputs for its business.
These
organizations, he explained, would be supported and provided the guarantee of a
ready market for their products. These value chain models, according to him,
has been successfully experimented in the areas of Packaging Material, Sorghum
and Cassava development models.
He revealed
that the company has also made progress in increasing the supply of sorghum
used for some of its beverages as more than 100,000 metric tonnes of the cereal
is annually sourced locally. “Over 250,000 farmers spread across several
agronomic zones in the North have been impacted by our Sorghum value chain
program as at 2013” he said.
Currently
the company’s brands are packaged using locally sourced packaging materials
such as bottles, cans, crates, cartons, crown corks, and
labels among others. As at 2016, 99 percent of these packaging
materials were locally sourced, opening wide opportunity to clusters of local
entrepreneurs.
Similarly,
the company has since 2015, been working with Psaltry International Limited, a
local cassava processing company to optimize the cassava value chain in the
country by providing industrial quality cassava starch to extract maltose syrup
for use in its brewing process.
The cassava
processing firm, has today become the biggest revelation coming out of the
backward integration story. Mrs.
Oluyemisi Iranloye, MD/CEO of the firm, informed journalists last week that the
firm has created a supply chain involving up to 5,000 farm
families which included more than 2,000 registered and unregistered out grower
farm families, marketers, transporters and retail input suppliers.
She added
that the company has saved the nation more than $7million in foreign exchange
in the past two years through local provision of processed cassava starch for
industrial use.
Nigerian
Breweries, according to Olowokere, was interested in strengthening and
expanding local ancillary business activities in Nigeria, particularly in the
procurement of raw materials such as starch-based inputs; and therefore
identified Psaltry, as a supplier of high-quality cassava starch.
He
maintained that the initiative was part of the company’s corporate philosophy
of “Winning with Nigeria” and in line with the current backward
integration process in the country.
The
partnership between corporate giants like Nigerian Breweries and local
entrepreneurs like Psaltry International Limited is also impacting
socio-economic development of small scale farming communities in Nigeria. Chief
Busari Amusa, Baale of Alayide, the host community of Psaltry International
Limited, was full of gratitude for the new infrastructural transformation that
had come to his community. “It is a dream come true. We have electricity,
boreholes for water and the roads are also opening up for accessibility between
our farms and the factory. My story has changed. Today, and less than two years
of this cassava business, I have a new house, a car and four of my children are
in higher institutions of learning. This is unbelievable,” he revealed during
the tour of the community last week.
0 Comments