From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, this is the Real Economy Report.

Sashnee Moodley:

JSE-listed fastmoving goods manufacturer Tiger Brands has been investing in its farming value chain to get closer to the source where products are cultivated and increase localisation of its procurement. The latest example is small white beans farmed for its Koo Baked Beans manufacturing facility. Marleny Arnoldi visited the farms and the factory.

Marleny Arnoldi:

Together with emerging farmer aggregator company SE Holdings, Tiger Brands invested in harvesters and other equipment for two women-owned farms in Bronkhorstspruit, which delivered their first batch of small white beans to Tiger Brands’ culinary manufacturing facility, in Boksburg, last month.

Tiger Brands uses the beans to produce the Koo baked beans product.

Tiger Brands has so far derived more than 50 t of small white beans from the Bronkhorstspruit farms for the first time.

The company had to import 2 500 t of small white beans last year at 30% higher prices when South Africa experienced a poor harvesting season. The group currently sources 83% of its bean requirement locally, while 17% remains imported.

To offset more of these imports, Tiger Brands launched a broad contracting programme involving 14 South Africa farmers, while the company will also further scale investment to the two Bronkhorstspruit farms with the aim of garnering 15% of its local bean supply from the area. The future investment on the farms will likely go toward irrigation and drones for fertilising and field monitoring.

Tiger Brands plans to procure 28 000 t/y of small white beans from local growers, compared with the current 19 000 t/y, by 2030.

The baked bean process involves picking of beans by hand and packing into wind rows and drying before being harvested by machines. After being transported to cleaning facilities where soil, stones and other foreign objects are removed, Tiger Brands sorts the beans by colour and size before a destoning and soaking process begins.

The beans are brined and sauced before moving to a rotary cooker where the beans are cooked inside of a sealed can. The cans are cooled and sent through an incubation process for ten days before quality sample checks are performed.

Having grown from a small production facility in 1946, Koo baked beans now ranks as the number one baked bean product in the market and is found in seven out of ten homes. Tiger Brands produces about 1.5-million cans of Koo baked beans a day, from six canning lines, five labelling lines and four packaging lines.

The canning facility can process 150 t of small white beans a day to ultimately produce about 240-million cans a year.

Sashnee Moodley:

That’s Creamer Media’s Real Economy Report. Join us again next week for more news and insight into South Africa’s real economy. Don’t forget to listen to the audio version of our Engineering News daily email newsletter.