Uganda National Farmers Federation

Hasmukh Dawda, is the chairman and founder of Britania Allied Industries Ltd in Uganda. His company is responsible for the Splash juices, Top-Up tomato sauce, Sunsip juice, Munchies biscuits and a host of other confectionaries.

Dawda, whose most popular line of juice is the Mango Splash, is looking to help jump-start mango growing in Uganda so he can stop importing mango pulp from India. His company imports about 300 tonnes a year of pulp with which the factory produces about 20,000 packets of mango juice daily.

“The local mangoes do not produce the kind of juice we are looking for, so we want to help introduce the Alphonso strain of mangoes so that we cannot only produce for the local market but can export the pulp,” Dawda says.

The current project aims at importing at least 200,000 Alphonso seedlings from India.
Each seedling will have landed at a cost of $13 for a total cost of about $2.5m. Dawda wants the Government to help offset this cost and Dawda will use his network to distribute the seedlings to farmers. They are still waiting for a government response.

But mango is not the only product where Dawda’s company has found local suppliers lacking – tomatoes, passion fruits, pineapples, wheat and chillies, which he has to source mostly from foreign markets. “When the farmers come we take everything, we do not turn away anybody who has the quality we require.

“In fact, we dream of the day when there will be too much supply that we can turn away farmers, but going by current trends that is not going to happen in a few years,” said Britania’s K. Sridharan, the marketing manager.

< Prev		Next >