A fruit and agricultural processing company in Nigeria, UtterlyYum, has partnered with local manufacturers of agricultural processing equipment through investments that will improve the quality of local alternatives to industrial processors imported fruits and foods.

Inadequate sponsorship of home-grown agricultural technologies continued to negatively impact the economy and value creation efforts, costing the country an estimated $3 billion a year, according to a statement, most entrepreneurs, manufacturing companies and the government relying mainly on foreign-produced machinery. .

Founder, UtterlyYum, Shola Adekoya, said supporting machines produced in Nigeria is one of the core principles of the UtterlyYum brand.

“We had to make innovation central to our culture. For example, instead of building traditional cold rooms that cost millions, we transformed discarded refrigerated truck crates into cold rooms using coolbot and regular air conditioning units.

The company recently launched three new products that use innovative, locally-made machinery to optimize the manufacturing process.

Adekoya said, “As we prepared to begin production of our new Pineapple & Coconut Juice, Dried Pineapple & Coconut, and Dried Fruits & Nuts, one of the challenges we faced was that of the time between when we develop products and the lead time of machines. import. I decided to make it another import substitution opportunity, which was a gamble, and met a local manufacturer who showed me what he had done in the past. »

“The partnership has resulted in the creation of a fully functional coconut processing machine, which is the first of its kind in Nigeria and is also energy efficient.”

Adekoya hopes to share the innovation with other local growers to help them achieve comparable levels of flexibility and efficiency.

Highlighting the need to share innovation for the benefit of the local manufacturing industry and UtterlyYum’s plans for the future, Adekoya said, “So far what we have done has been to help ourselves and the people around us, I’m going to create these types of secondary opportunities instead. available to society as a whole as we focus on our core mission which we believe has a lot of value that we will unlock.