WELLINGTON AND WHITE Agribusiness Development
IAN WHITE
Ian@wellingtonandwhite.com
ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT
The two projects below were both start up operations. They were taken from an original idea spotting an opportunity through complex design and negotiations with banks and equity partners to implementation and operation.
Fisher Foods was created to fill a production gap in the UK fresh fruit salad market and take advantage of the excellent climate that South Africa has for fruit production.
The factory was constructed close to Johannesburg International Airport and manufactured fresh fruit salads which were shipped daily by air to UK supermarkets.
The business was developed from concept to fully operational in a time scale of just over two years.
During this time we took the project from concept, raised equity by bringing in a UK PLC as a partner, secured debt, and designed the whole factory and set out the growing plan for production.
The operation was eventually purchased by a South African PLC.
Cape Concentrate is a 20 million USD operation producing aseptic tomato paste concentrate from its state of the art factory in Port Elizabeth on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa.
The factory has an intake capacity of 1000 tonne of
tomatoes per day producing around 150 tonne per day of
high quality bulk tomato paste.
Despite its climatic advantages for tomato production
South Africa was a net importer of tomato paste. This
along with the fact that the Eastern Cape climate of
South Africa allows one of the longest processing tomato
production periods in the world were key factors in
making the decision to look at the green field
opportunity.
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