NatureRipe = Awesome

I went to visit with the head of NatureRipe today, a firm that farms over 100 acres of mangoes south of Dar along the coast line. It is an incredible company and would be an ideal target for agri-investing.

The head of the firm and chair of the Board are both African Muslim women who know their firm down to the smallest detail. Part of my project is to identify supply chain partners that would be a good investment for USAID in order to prove how re-arranging the supply chain dynamics within horticulture can best benefit local farmers. NatureRipe has two main lines of business: grows mangoes and purchases cashews that they then process with flavoring. All of NatureRipe’s products are of export quality, which is hard to come by here – but it’s what we are used to the in U.S.

What I admired most was where they saw their company in a few short years. For example, if their mangoes are not of quality to sell as fresh fruit, they will sell the produce to other mango producers to be made into concentrate, at a lower price than fresh whole product. However, in the future, they want to move all their operations that are split between their farm and Dar to the farm. They want to build a on-site factory that allows them to package on-site with private labeling and jarring - as well as have the machinery to make concentrate or make jam.

We also talked about their plans underway for revenue diversification. Mangoes are harvested between November and January – so they have started to plant more short-term crops to even out their cash flow (good call!) As a result, they have started planting pineapples and watermelons among other fruits. Apparently the seedless watermelons were a real hit here – but the order of seedless watermelon seeds didn’t work out as expected from their source in Vietnam (!) – so they were only able to harvest a small batch. Who knew that in good conditions, it takes only 64 days from seed to full=grown watermelon?

They also want to start planting vegetables. Apparently mango trees have to be planted 8km apart (who knew!?) so there is a decent amount of space between the seedlings for other plants.

Lastly, NatureRipe used to sell mangoes to a few buyers in the Middle East. However, then the fruit fly reached Tanzania and entire batches of goods would be deemed unmarketable if a single fruit fly was around – so they lost those contracts because they could not produce enough volume. To solve this, NatureRipe started selling seedlings so that local farmers or farming groups could plant them – in this way, there is a larger volume and larger community of producers to potentially regain the export markets.

In the end, I purchased a bag of fresh no-salt cashews right at the office – and they gave me one of their cashew honey bars to try as well. Both are delicious. They gave me more cashews – and even two bitter tomato vegetables for me to try in my stew*. It was a great visit and I am truly impressed. They have few competitors among mangoes since they are creating and own the market of the export-quality kind – yet their competition is steep in the cashew / peanut market. I am really hopeful for their growth model and I know that an investment in helping them gain access to capital for their processing / packaging facility would be money well spent.

* I didn’t mention that I make “stew” nor gave any impression that I like stew; little do they know my affinity for Bagel Bites over waiting a really long time to cook something.