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Thu, Oct 15, 2009
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Lewes man helps African
company improve potato chips
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Malawi crisp producer learns about standards
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Lewes’ Dave Bernheisel has traveled the world on a variety of foreign duty assignments. He’s monitored voting in Eastern Bloc countries and provided assistance to Roobys tea growers in South Africa.
But Bernheisel’s trip in late September to Malawi, a landlocked and desperately impoverished country in south central Africa, was an assignment to help a small company improve its potato chip production operation.
Bernheisel visited Malawi on an assignment by the Citizens Network of Foreign Affairs, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, nongovernmental organization that provides economic opportunities to people and enterprises in developing countries.
The organization’s Farmer-to-Farmer program seeks to improve the lives of farmers and people in agribusinesses in Southern and East Africa, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Bernheisel, 73, has extensive experience in several areas of foreign duty. He’s worked for the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe, monitoring various elections in Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Albania and Georgia.
His work with the Farmer-to-Farmer program has included assignments in Ukraine, Moldova, South Africa and, most recently, Malawi. Bernheisel said in Malawi, farmers weren’t getting fair prices for their potatoes because brokers were taking a third of the selling price.
Farmers formed a co-op to cut out the middleman and looked for ways to add value to their product, potatoes, which led to opening a potato chip plant. Bernheisel said with a government loan, potato chip company Biriwiri Farmers and Marketing Co-op (BIFAM) purchased manufacturing equipment from India. “My assignment was to work with them on standards, procedures and quality control,” said Bernheisel.
He set up training programs with the plant’s dozen or so employees. For the first five days he had plant workers write everything involved in producing their potato chips – potato crisps as they are called in Malawi – on large pieces of paper tacked onto the walls – from washing and peeling potatoes to sharpening potato-slicer blades, to frying, de-oiling, weighing and bagging of chips.
He said when the workers reviewed the resulting compiled document they have a sense of ownership. “The workers are the authors because the ideas are theirs. It isn’t something that some guy from halfway around the world came in and said here’s what you’ve got to do, and then they put it on a shelf and never look at it again,” said Bernheisel.
He said a standard such as weighing bags of chips had slipped. Implementing a procedure of weighing every 10th bag “gets you back to reality.”
He said a couple of chapters are about needed enhancements and ways to boost sales through creative marketing. “Their sales volume isn’t what it should be,” he said.
Just because it’s in an impoverished region of Africa, don’t think the BIFAM chip plant is operating in a snack-food market vacuum. Their competition, of sorts, doesn’t come any larger than mega-pound chip producer Frito-Lay.
“Lay’s potato chips are coming in from South Africa, where they have a plant, and there are a couple of major, well-capitalized food packagers in Malawi operating big plants. Their potato chips are also in stores in foil packages,” said Bernheisel.
He said BIFAM is developing marketing plans that would chip away at sales of the big producers by selling potato chips in bulk to bars and restaurants. “It’s a market that no one is addressing. A bar owner might put chips out for customers as a gratis thing in hopes that they’d drink more beer or offer them by the bowl at whatever price,” he said.
Chips are packaged in 25-gram bags that are simple 18 centimeter-long, clear plastic sleeves sealed at both ends – most of the time. “Even if everything worked perfectly, the plastic and the sealer aren’t really good,” Bernheisel said. He said the plastic packaging used there doesn’t compare to industrialized-world, potato chip bags that even resist many consumer opening methods.
“There’s no problem opening these; they come apart too easily,” he said. “Another problem with clear bags is that sunlight shortens a potato chip’s shelf life. What you see in stores here is the foil-pack. That’s what they want to go to, but it’s going to cost them $25,000 to get set up.”
A bag of chips sells for about 18 cents. Though that might sound like a small sum, it’s nearly one-fifth of the average Malawian’s $1-a-day salary. “The stuff I saw that you could buy, you just couldn’t make it on $1 a day,” said Bernheisel.
He said Malawians are warm, gracious and welcoming, and while there he became a part of their extended family. “Poverty there is really bad; it’s severe,” said Bernheisel.
Bernheisel was in Ntcheu, a village of about 5,000 people, in the country’s central region.
He said potato chips aren’t indigenous to Malawian culture. “The old culture is going away, and world culture is coming in. Typically what happens is they lose the best of the old, and they get the worst of the new,” said Bernheisel.
Like any business aiming to boost its bottom line, BIFAM is looking ahead for the next new thing. “What they call chips we call french fries. Everybody sells them there, and they’re terrible,” said Bernheisel.
He said oil the fries are cooked in just isn’t hot enough, resulting in a partially cooked, extremely greasy product.
“With BIFAM’s facility and its ability to wash and peel potatoes, and the hot oil in their cooker, they could run a batch of french fries every day at lunchtime.
“They’d get to be known as the best chips in Malawi,” said Bernheisel. |
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