Zimbabwe readies for tomato paste exports

One of the country's leading agribusiness concerns, Sondelani Ranching will soon start exporting tomato paste from its newly commissioned processing plant in Bulawayo into the region as it forges ahead to consolidate revenues of its latest business unit.
Sondelani Ranching chief executive officer Mr Peter Cunningham said the USD 2 million state-of-the-art tomato processing plant had processed about 2 000 metric tonnes as part of its trial runs.
"We just did the trial runs, we did about a thousand to 1 800 tonnes of tomatoes to make sure it's working. Its ready to go and I think we have a good market for it (tomato paste). Tomatoes are on the ground, farmers are growing them so we should start harvesting them until the end of November," he said.

Mr Cunningham said the tomato factory was most likely to run from October to June annually as production of the fruit would be at its peak during that period. The company has already made plans to export within the region. "The first 6 000 tonnes will be in Zimbabwe to replace imports and after that it will be Namibia, DRC (Congo), and South Africa. There is a very big demand in South Africa, they are already pushing us there," said Mr Cunningham.
South Africa imports about 30 000 tonnes of tomato paste annually while the other biggest importers are Democratic Republic of Congo (16 630), Angola (16 000) and Namibia (1 208). Mr Cunningham said the company was prompted to set up the tomato processing plant so as to uptake the anticipated large produce from farmers trained under the Turning Matabeleland Green (TMG) programme.

TMG is a non-profit making organisation formed in 2013 that seeks to develop a network of competent farmer partners to meet the country's growing food and export needs. To date over 13 000 small-scale farmers have been trained under its programmes.

Some complementary data
See also our article "Zimbabwe: tomato paste plant starts operations"

Source : bulawayo24.com