Pauline Okubasu is the CEO and Founder of Azaavi Foods which specializes in adding value to fruits including mangoes and pineapples.
The budding entrepreneur revealed she started the business in 2018 after quitting the corporate world where she had worked for 11 years.
The idea to venture into the dried food business was inspired by the multiple losses that people experienced with perishable foods. This prompted her to think about how she could extend the shelf life of perishable foods to ensure food security.
“Having been in the airline business and traveled to the Far East, I had seen that they dried fruits and these are the things that I used to love gifting people. I saw a market gap. I reckoned that in Kenya we have seasonal fruits which people love.
“To allow them to enjoy them throughout the year, I reckoned I could dehydrate them and prolong the shelf life say over one year then we can maintain the nutritional value as we eat,” she recalls.
Okubasu revealed she started small with an initial capital of Sh15,000. To test the waters, she started with mangoes, pineapple, and bananas, after undergoing training at the Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute (KIRDI) for one and a half years.
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The training honed her skills in developing the products, ensuring that she complied with food safety, and health regulations, and also assisted her in getting the standardised mark after the products were tested and ensured they were fit for human consumption.
With time, the business grew attracting many customers and now she has employed five women, three in production and two out and front office.
She sells 100g packet of dried fruits at between Sh130 to Sh260. In a month she produces 1.5 tonnes of dried fruit.
“We capitalise on high season. Sometimes in high seasons, we produce even two tonnes so that we store. You might find that sometimes we do not do production because we have enough stored for the year,” she says.
She notes that not all fruits qualify for this type of value addition as some farmers do not observe good agricultural practices when growing their fruits.
“We visit farms and look at the fruits, how they are being farmed, if the farmer employs best agronomic practices, the fertilisers used, if they are keeping records,” she says.
Among the major challenges she has encountered are a lack of funding and expensive registration. Okubasu says banks have not understood the sector very well and are very concerned about the sustainability of the business given some fruits are seasonal.
She adds that the registration process is too expensive for small businesses given the multiple licenses required. According to her, to get quality clearance, you have to pay the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS) for each product.
“As a small trader, you are taxed everywhere… from the farms to the transport. Business licenses are expensive and eat into profit margins. There is health licensing which I see as a duplication.‘’
“On the business license, there’s health which you pay Sh5000, but you still have to go to a health facility and pay another amount of Sh5,000. It can be quite challenging,” she says.
