After 14 years of effectively dominating the biscuits market, the Beloxxi Industries Limited, makers of Beloxxi Cream Crackers, the prime indigenous biscuit brand in the Nigerian market is set to make a new move.
The latest move according to the President/CEO of Beloxxi, Obi Ezeude is as a result of the latest production volume expansion of the facility which at completion would make 80,000 metric tonnes of biscuits in a year.
In February 2018, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo commissioned the second phase of the expansion of Beloxxi in Agbara, Ogun State and also laid the foundation for the third phase.
With an earlier completion of the third phase ahead of scheduled time, Beloxxi’s extra production lines would be deployed into making other biscuits outside the crackers family.
This will include variants of biscuits simply called sweet biscuits and with foreign experts already on ground to assist the Nigerian experts work out the final modalities, the company will soon announce the names of the new products that would help ensure the dominance of the Beloxxi brand in the sector.
In a discussion with the media in Agbara Thursday, Ezeude stated that Beloxxi’s cream crackers has done so well in the past 14 years and after sustaining about 74 percent of the cream crackers market share, it is logical that the brand introduces more products that target also to be the best in the sub group, like the cream crackers have done.
Prior to this move, the company has already put in place a mega storage warehouse of modern standard that is meant to take about 1.2m cartons of biscuits at a time.
The warehouse built into a mesh of metal racks will contain 5,000 pallets with cartons of biscuits that amount to some 800,000 cartons, and with the extra spaces, the target is a storage facility that would ensure that even when there is a necessity not to produce, the company would not run out of stock for sometime.
The automated shuttle loading system called warehouse space management system operates via a robot rack loader or shuttle that automatically handles the loading and offloading of biscuits.
The new warehouse is part of the expansion, which also includes three production lines bringing it to a total of nine, which makes Beloxxi the highest consumer of the Italian Imaforni automated production lines in Africa.
Ezeude also recalled that the company had started a backward integration of setting up some allied manufacturing and logistics business including the SageMill Packaging Company and the Theremma Logistics Company Ltd.
The Sagemill factory has been there since late 2018 and producing wrappers for the biscuits and also corrugated cartons for the packaging of the products, while Theremma handles logistics and distribution.
The company that boasts of about 3,500 workers said in the future, it may spread into some other countries in Africa starting from West Africa.
The CEO also assured that in these years Beloxxi has been in existence as a manufacturing outfit, it has made good its target of providing employment for young Nigerians, giving them the opportunity to mature into young professionals and also find livelihood in their country instead of migrating to other countries out of frustration occasioned by unemployment.
