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Tanzania: Local avocado oil firm adds value to farm produce
Dar es Salaam-based Nzallacado Oil Company ventured into fruit farming in 2005, originally thinking to sell the farm products locally. The firm’s founders – the Shafia Nzallawahe family – cultivated a 5-ha farm on which they grew the Hass and Fuerte avocado varieties. Seven years after the company started farming these avocados, harvesting of the same started. However, new varieties found it difficult to penetrate the Tanzanian market, as consumers still favored the traditional varieties.
That meant the Nzallawahe family was compelled to lower the prices of their avocados, their high quality production costs notwithstanding. That is why they then started making avocado oil, manually, at home. This entailed boiling the raw material from the fruit in pots and filtering the oil by hand. However, the quality of the processed oil wasn’t particularly impressive, and they decided to seek relevant skills and technological