africaJUICE has a target to establish at least three production locations across Africa by 2014 and has a well developed plan in place to deliver this objective.
Our strategy is to identify the optimum intersection between fruit products that have significant value and market growth potential and production locations that have the best blend of growing conditions, labour and land availability, as well as fiscal and political stability. This strategy gives competitive advantages over current tropical juice producers in terms of reliability and security of supply, quality of production, and cost.
Our first project is the Upper Awash Project in Ethiopia. The project involves the investment of almost €12 million to rehabilitate and expand an existing state-owned fruit farm in the Upper Awash region of Ethiopia. Our approach is to secure the delivery of this project and then replicate the success of the model in other locations in Ethiopia and across Africa. These other locations will both expand the volume potential of existing products and diversify our product range into juices, concentrates and purees of fruits such as banana, guava, pineapple, jackfruit and other exotic tropicals.
The second production location, which is also in Ethiopia, has been defined and initial discussions are ongoing to secure the land. Additional prospecting has been carried out by africaJUICE in Tanzania and Mozambique and other locations in East Africa.
We design our projects from the outset to be models of sustainable development, incorporating elements to ensure they deliver substantial social, environmental and economic returns. Through a variety of measures outlined in more detail in our approach we will strengthen the business and ensure overall sustainability.