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By Enyeribe Ejiogu
For Dr Olawumni Fakoya, the decision she took to resign from Promasidor, after working in the company for six years and rising to become the Quality Control Auditor, and go into private enterprise, has continued to pay off.
Her company, JDP Global Tech Farm Nigeria Limited is making giant strides as an agro-processing and packaging enterprise, which is recording growth milestones and becoming a reference point for small and medium scale enterprises in the food products industry.
With dual certifications by the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA), the firm is fast positioning for outstanding growth.
In this interview, Fakoya who studied Food Science and Technology at the Federal Polytechnic, Offa, Kwara State, and got a doctorate degree from Kennedy University, gives hints on how the sales channel strategy of her company provides young graduates an opportunity to start out in sales in the FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) market.
How does your typical day start?
When I wake up in the morning, being a serious, rapture-focused Christian, I spend one and a half hours to two hours with my God in the morning. And then, I study the word (the bible). After that, the next thing I do is to check my messages, to see if there are pending orders for products that we have to meet and to know if there are products we don’t have in stock, which we need to process. I check for the production materials we ordered have been delivered. For instance, one morning I saw a message from a client who wanted us to produce tea for her under contract manufacturing arrangement. t Based on what I learn from my messages, I give necessary instructions to my staff. So, basically, that is how my day starts.
You just mentioned that you do contract manufacturing. What is the scale of contract manufacturing you do?
We don’t do less than 100 MOQ (minimum order quantity), which means 100 packs of the product. For every one of our products we MOQs for contract manufacturing. In this regard, we produce our products (tea, soya, bean flour, pap flour, rice poundo –rice flour and fufu flour) under their brand name and packaging in exactly the way we make it under our brand name. We don’t cut corners. It is the same quality, the same standard as the one that carries our brand name, logo and other corporate identity. The reason we maintain the same standard is simple: if we deliver a lower quality product will the customer come again? The answer is no. We will lose both name and reputation. Essentially, we strive every day to maintain manufacturing excellence, in reverence for God and my conscience. You never know, one of my relatives or friends could buy the product somewhere and eat it. So, we keep this in mind when we begin producing each batch of our products. We work as if Jesus is physically watching what we are doing. In essence, we do contract manufacturing on any product that is food related.
As I said earlier, we deliberately keep the MOQ low as a way of supporting aspiring entrepreneurs who don’t have the equipment. These are start-ups that are just entering the market and cannot afford to pay for higher quantities.
For your branded products, give me a picture of your distribution chain.
Currently, we do business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customers (B2C). We supply to our B2B customers at our own cost. We use Uber to distribute because we have determined that it is cheaper. We previously used our bus, which entailed having a driver and fueling it. On the outward journey, the bus will carry goods and the return empty. It will burn fuel to and fro. This was costly, and we decided to stop. With Uber, we can deliver to about four or five stores, we only pay for the outward journey. The staff member who accompanies the consignment will then use public transport to come back, which is far less expensive. Before, the bus would have come back empty, burning fuel.
For our B2C customers, they either arrange for pick-up by themselves or they tell us to dispatch to them at their own cost. But the order is not what a rider cannot carry, we use Uber to deliver.
As a mother who is an entrepreneur, what is your advice to young graduates or undergraduates giving this reality of the economy? How can they get into your value chain and what incentives will they get?
My advice is that they should till they graduate before they can get into entrepreneurship. I have a son, who will turn 16 soon. Just before he wrote the JSS3 exam he told me to arrange for him to learn tailoring for three months during the long vacation before going into SS1. He was very serious about it. We found a place where he trained for one month. Within the one month, he learnt to cut and sew well. Now he sews school uniforms for his school mates and also sews his own clothes. He designs and sews kaftan and other native and other wears for men. When I travelled to London for business I took some of his designs for exhibition. He is going into SS3.
The President Bola Tinubu administration says it wants Nigeria to become a US$1 trillion economy. What do you think needs to be done to facilitate exports by value-adding SMEs, especially as AGOA has been extended?
The government says it wants us to export. My question is export to where? We need contacts, reliable contacts. There has to be an organised way of sourcing export opportunities. Where and how do you sell your products? When I went to the United Kingdom recently with my products, I had to go from shop to shop to seek orders. So, the government can help us through the Nigeria Export Promotion Council to facilitate the sourcing of prospective overseas customers and providing the information through a transparent means.
Nigeria has done so much in terms of crude oil sales. It should be more practical in encouraging non-oil export businesses, particularly in the area of processed Nigerian food products. It is not enough to say export. What effort is the government making to link us with buyers overseas? Not the ones we will consign cargo to and they will not pay. Some of the products I took to London, I placed in Nigerian-owned stores. I was able to do so because I have friends there, I know their stores and I believe they will pay me after they have sold the stock. If I didn’t have the privilege of going there, how would I know who to send the goods to? The government needs to walk its talk. It should make moves to help us.
As an agro-processing and packaging entrepreneur how are you supporting the attainment of the women inclusivity initiatives of the Sustainable Development Goals, SDG, particularly in the area of growing women-led micro-enterprises?
We are already doing this through the way we are building our distribution chain. For instance, we have a woman in Ibadan who sells our products. She supplies to stores and she is doing well. We will welcome more such dealers. Again as I said earlier, under an agreed arrangement we can put the contact number of the distributor on the packaging, but it will clearly state that it was produced by JDP Global Tech Farm Nigeria Limited but marketed by so-and-so with the contact number of the person or business. But then a person must necessarily meet the MOQ.
How do you give back to society?
Currently, we have had to support schools if they were holding sports events and invited us. We would then sponsor them by paying for the branded vests. We also do collaborations with NGOs, which gives people an opportunity to sample our products. This is a kind of experiential marketing. We support health outreach programmes during which check their blood pressure and sugar level and get a health talk by healthcare practitioners. They also learn how our branded food products can be helpful to their overall health. Take our Zobo tea and Zobo drinks, for instance as well as our kilishi, akara chips and the packaged food products. We usually get a stand to display our products and sell to parents who accompany their children to such sporting events. Some of the women who own shops sometimes accept to stock our products.
What is your final advice to young graduates?
My advice is simple: you have no reason to be idle. If you can talk or make a phone call, you can sell. You should find something productive to do. It is only unimaginative, unenterprising graduates who stay unemployed. Don’t do Yahoo Yahoo and stuff like that. I want to tell young people that they can actually make money. Good, clean money. Let them be creative. There are products you can develop. There are things you can develop or innovate and make money with it. In our own time, there was no phone, nothing. Use the data on your phone to create something that will give you money. Do something creative to put money in your pocket, whether it is to teach an online course or to stream online.
So, let us encourage them. Even to us parents that have youths at home, let us encourage them to do the right thing, to do, to be creative. Let us encourage them. Give them that laptop, let them do something positive.
There are so many courses to learn online. There are these calling cards and all that. Youths can make money in a good way. Let them advertise their business online. Those who have gone to learn catering, those who have gone to learn sewing, I do tell them, if you don’t learn catering, it’s easy for you because you eat in your house every day.
The food you cook at home, dish it well, and before you eat it, snap it, you know, make it presentable, there’s a way the food should be served. Snap it, put it on your status, then you can go ahead to eat your food. You know, you have used two stones to kill one bird.
For those who are sewing, showcase what you have, and so let people see. That is the way to promote it. It goes a long way. People used to pay me to cook fried rice for them when their children were coming home from school. But I am doing that anymoreSo I used to actually do that. But I want to outsource it.
