Dangote Opens Tomato Factory to Produce 1,200 Metric Tons Per Day

The Dangote Group has opened a tomato-processing factory near Nigeria’s northern city of Kano aimed at competing againts imports from China.

“We have fully started operations today and the target is 1,200 metric tons per day,” the managing director of Dangote Farms Limited, which runs the plant, Abdulkareem Kaita, said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg.

He said: “We are going to work with the farmers, they can afford to produce more because there’s a processing factory and they don’t have to suffer losses like they did before.”

The plant, which will produce 1,200 metric tons per day was built following a 2011 Central Bank of Nigeria study that showed it was cheaper to process tomato paste locally than import from China, the source of about 300,000 tons a year worth $360 million.

Dangote’s facility will produce more than 400,000 tons of paste annually, with most of its raw material coming from farmers in the Kadawa Valley in Kano state.