Great question! Basically, a tomato processing factory is no good unless you can source your tomatoes:
1) at the right price
2) over the right period of time
3) in the right volume
4) at the right quality

1/ https://twitter.com/boardchair/status/1355529642820706304

This is different from factories that process rice, soy, maize or even cassava & sugar. Tomatoes are highly perishable. You can’t buy & stockpile them for later use (which you can do with cereals). And you can’t keep them in the field either (which you can do with sugar & tubers)

So how can you ensure that you get your tomatoes at the right cost, volume, time and quality? Well, either you have to grow them yourself or you have to enter into contracts with farmers who you trust will be able to deliver for you.

In 2013 and 2014 I did a lot of desk research and also made a bunch of trips to Nigeria to better understand what vegetable farmers were doing. I was able to visit and talk to a pretty good sample of farmers across Plateau, KD, Nasarawa, Niger, Kano, and Kwara States.

From what I saw, there weren’t any farmers that would be able to successfully grow for me under contract right away. During this time, I also went to California and met with a bunch of tomato farmers and processors there to ask for their advice on how to enter this biz.

Every single person I met with in California told me a) that I was crazy and b) if I really wanted to do this thing, I should forget about processing for the time being and focus on being a farmer initially.

Why? Because no one in Nigeria was able to farm at the right cost per ton to make processing competitive. Remember, the first thing a factory needs is at the right price.

I was going to need to totally change up the tomato farming scene if I wanted to put up a factory.

The Cali folks figured (correctly) that farming in Nigeria was probably much harder than in the US, and if I didn’t know how to successfully farm tomatoes myself in that environment, there was no way I’d be able to get other people to farm them for me under any kind of contract.