By Steve Agbota
Nigerian Breweries Plc (NB), has said it is deepening its partnership with local entrepreneurs and farmers to harness huge value chain gain from its backward integration policy.
The company’s Corporate Communications and Brand Public Relations Manager, Mr. Patrick Olowokere, said the brewer was consolidating its local sourcing of inputs for its operations to attain 60 per cent local input sourcing by 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 added that the strategy was to identify organisations that could produce raw materials and ancillary products as inputs for its business.
These organisations, he hinted would be supported and provided the guarantee of a ready market for their products. Adding that these value chain models, have 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.
Said he: Over 250,000 farmers spread across several agronomic zones in the North have been impacted by our Sorghum value chain program as at 2013. Currently the companys 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, NB has since 2015, been working with Psaltry International Limited, a local cassava processing company to optimise the cassava value chain in the country by providing industrial quality cassava starch to extract maltose syrup for use in its brewing process.
The Managing Director/CEO of Psaltry International Limited, Mrs. Oluyemisi Iranloye told journalists last recently 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 $7 million 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 local 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 companys 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 said.