A food processing firm, Izonebi Foods said it is upgrading its productive facilities in order to capture a greater share of the market in the South-South region.
Izonebi Foods with its factory at Elebele near Yenagoa, is involved in the processing of bean and plantain flour and production of millet and guinea corn into dry pap, a product it calls ‘Ginllet’ as well as soya into powder.
Co-president of Izonebi Foods, Siyesikibo Briggs, told our correspondent in Yenagoa that the firm wants five percent of the consumer market for processed foods in the region.
Siyesikibo observed that the monthly consumption of the products was between N2.0 billion and N3.0 billion annually and that the policy thrust of his firm was to capture five percent of the market.
He said “We want to be there with the best, but for now, we are working towards getting five percent of the market in the South-South region which will translate into between N100 million and N150 million monthly.”
In a bid to increase production, he said the firm has acquired five more milling machines in addition to the three it had before and that once they were installed, production would peak.
Siyesikibo lamented that in spite of the huge demand for Izonebi’s products, they were manually producing about 100 cartons of all products monthly but with the acquisition of the new machines, production would rise to 1,000 cartons monthly.
He said “our products are in great demand and we have distributors in Yenagoa, Lagos, Owerri, Port Harcourt, Benin and Umuahia. We have also had requests for supply of our products from Ghana.”
According to him, the major challenge facing the company is that of finance and that since the company started production a few years ago, there has been the challenge of acquiring more machines for optimum production.
SAMUEL ESE, Yenagoa
