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.
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