Months after top tomato paste maker, Chief Eric Umeofia, said he was leaving Nigeria to set up shops in Kenya, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire and Ethiopia be
Months after top tomato paste maker, Chief Eric Umeofia, said he was leaving Nigeria to set up shops in Kenya, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire and Ethiopia because of the harsh realities of doing business in Nigeria while also relocating his key manufacturing plant to China, following what he described as policy inconsistencies now crippling his Nigeria operations, another tomatoe paste producer, Dangote tomato, a subsidiary of Dangote group of companies, is set to resume production in February.
This is coming after a prolonged shutdown occasioned by scarcity of raw materials and pest invasion, Tuta Absoluta, which affected harvests. The tomato paste producer was forced to suspend production in May 2016, three months after it began operations. According to the managing director of the factory, Abdulkadir Kaita,
“We expect that tomato farmers would have produced enough for the company to process, hence our decision to resume production in February. We have the capacity to produce 40 trucks or 1,200 tonnes of tomato on a daily basis and we would therefore be hiring more hands when we re-open.”
