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By Chinyere Anyanwu [email protected]
Crashing the high cost of bread will be a huge possibility if the Orange Fleshed Sweet Potato (OFSP) flour is incorporated into bread making and other confectionaries to augment wheat flour.
The submission was made recently by the Chief Executive Officer of Helogenous Agro Products Limited, Helen Omowunmi Oduyemi, in a chat with Daily Sun.
The CEO of the Ibadan, Oyo State-based agribusiness firm, while speaking on ways of tackling the consistently rising cost of bread, said Nigeria should look into adopting sweet potato flour, especially the orange fleshed variety, to solve the wheat problem.
According to Oduyemi, OFSP “can be used at ratio 60:40 (wheat flour 60 per cent, potato flour 40 per cent) and this is higher than the ratio at which you can add cassava flour to wheat. The OFSP flour is like carrot, has very good pouri, and high in nutrition. The texture of bread made from it is softer and finer and you use less sugar. It brings down the cost of production.”
She further explained that, “it’s not only wheat that people use for bread production. It’s only in Nigeria that they are still using only wheat to produce bread. Potato is cheap, and it grows faster than cassava. Potato takes three months while cassava takes a year to mature. In one year they would have harvested potato three times.
“Besides, potato bread tastes better than cassava bread and potato bread is more nutritious. That is what we are canvassing for. We want nutrition in our food; we don’t just want people to eat, we want them to eat nutritious food. Including potato flour, which is already high in sugar and other nutrients, into wheat flour will enrich the flour and reduce the sugar needed for production. So if there’s anything I’ll like to push for in respect of reducing cost of bread, it will be the use of OFSP flour in bread making and other confectionaries. We can change the narrative.”
The Helogenous Agro Products Limited boss, who stated that inability to explore other available options is the reason Nigerian bakers and consumers are complaining, said Ghana has incorporated the OFSP flour into bread making and other confectionaries for about three years, and is therefore not groaning over high cost of bread.
Oduyemi, who noted that cassava that is being considered for inclusion into wheat flour for bread making already has a lot of things it’s competing with, informed that, “last year, Nigerian bakers met in Abuja and they said they will partner with potato farmers for large scale production of the crop for incorporation into their baking business but they have not done anything about that yet.”
