$20 Million noodles factory commissioned
Ghana’s quest to ensure that each district in the country has a factory in line with a vision to ensure industrialisation received a major boost today with the inauguration of a $20 million indomie noodles and spaghetti manufacturing factory.
The factory, situated on the Spintex Road in the Tema West Municipality in the Greater Accra Region, under the Dufil Ghana Limited, has a production capacity of 30,000 tonnes of indomie noodles and 8,000 tonnes of spaghetti annually.
Fully automated
The fully automated factory came with automated carton caser machine which undertakes automatic packaging of the packs as well as a seasoning dispenser machine that seasons the noodles before being wrapped by the caser machine.
Inaugurating the factory, the Senior Minister, Mr Yaw Osafo-Maafo, who represented the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, said the new factory had joined a list of more than 100 factories that had been opened and were operational in some districts nationwide.
He indicated that the establishment of these factories under the programme were to ensure avenues were created for people within an expanded economy.
He said the location of the factory in Ghana to produce the noodles meant that the company, through it’s subsidiary marketing company, Multi-pro Limited, would no longer import the products from Nigeria for sale in Ghana as had been the case since 2006 when the products were first introduced onto the Ghanaian market.
Economic expansion
The senior minister was of the view that the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AFCFTA) provided a platform for factories such as what the De Foods Limited had undertaken to take advantage of produce and export to the West African sub region and the entire continent.
He expressed delight at the sourcing of majority of the company’s agricultural base raw materials for its production from Ghana, which, he stressed, was good for the government’s agriculture policy.
“In view of the huge market of indomie products in Ghana, I have also encouraged the company to endeavour to situate a similar factory in the northern part of the country in line with our government’s efforts to decentralise industrialisation and ensure employment is spread evenly across the country so as not to concentrate factories at one point as had happened in the past where all of Ghana’s industries were sited in Tema,” Mr Osafo-Maafo stated.
Trade minister
For his part, the Minister of Trade, Mr Alan Kyerematen, indicated that the ID1F idea was to address the issue of unemployment among young people who were unable to find decent jobs to earn a living.
He said the Trade Ministry was currently working with Participating Financial Institutions (PFIs) to establish factories in other districts across the country without active business promoters.
“Currently, there are 112 districts out of 260 districts with projects at various stages of implementation and this we believe is a positive development drive,” Mr Kyeremanteng said.
The Greater Accra Regional Minister, Mr Ishmael Ashitey, commended the Dufil Prima Foods PLC, the parent company of De Food Industries, for their continuos investment in the Ghanaian economy.
He noted that situating the production plant in Accra which could employ some 150 people was a test case of the government’s aggressive private sector led growth to influence the economy in general.
De Foods Limited
The Head of Business at Dufil Ghana, Mr Mahesh Shah, in his welcome address, commended the Ghanaian government for providing an enabling environment for the company to operate in.
That, he said, was evident in the indomie product becoming a household name with more than 150 million packs being sold at the close of the 2019 fiscal year.
He expressed the hope that the new factory which would deploy more local content in its production would inject a lot more revenue into the country’s economy.