What started out as a modest food production endeavour in the basement of Nutridense’s owner, Ms Alem Greiling, is now transitioning to a fully fledged food processing venture through automation and expansion of the company’s distribution channels.
The multifaceted benefits of the oats business in Ethiopia led to Innovations Against Poverty supporting Nutridense so that they could scale production and start serving Ethiopia’s large low-income market. Since then, the company has engaged more than 200 farmers, boosted its production capacity 5-fold and doubled its sales figures.
These are all big breakthroughs for a company working against a tide of negative taboos surrounding oats. Together with the Ethiopian Agriculture Research Institute, Nutridense have been able to educate value chain actors to appreciate the high value crop that oats actually are.
Led by a passionate female entrepreneur who pioneered the popularisation of oats production in the Ethiopian agricultural system, Nutridense have been processing oatmeal and oat-based granola since 2016, to date their small food processing equipment could only process 10kg of oats at a time
With the support of IAP, Nutridense can now move to a larger processing facility where they can work near grain supplying farmers and better accommodate its growing production. This will see the company having a direct impact on Ethiopian lives through their engagement of over 1000 farmers as raw material suppliers, 100 women-owned businesses as distributors and over 15,000 low-income consumers.