Description

Cassava is one of the most important root crops in Nigeria. Apart from being a staple crop in both rural and urban house-holds cassava is a major source of income to cassava farmers and processors in the rural areas.

Nigeria is currently the world leading producer of cassava, producing about forty million {40,000,000} Mt. per annum and cassava alone contributes about 5 % of agricultural GDP in Nigeria for food or domestic purposes but its industrial processing and utilization has been very limited.

Since the return to civil rule in 1999, Nigeria has witnessed steady but minimal growth of the middle class. These growths continue to drive the increasing social and health awareness of the need for hygienically well-prepared foods required for good quality living standard of people.

This coupled with the geometrically exploding population and continued rural-urban drift continues to fuel the demand for food stuffs like Garri and odourless fufu flour in Nigeria.

Garri is a creamy-white, granular flour with a slightly fermented flavour and a slightly sour taste made from fermented, gelatinized fresh cassava tubers. Garri is widely known in Nigeria and other West African countries. Garri constitutes a daily meal to millions of people world-wide.

Fufu Flour is fermented wet-paste made from cassava. Fufu is very rich in carbohydrate and has smooth texture. It is ranked next to gari as an indigenous food of most Nigerians in the south. Traditionally, it is produced in the wet form with moisture content of 40-50 per cent with an offensive characteristic odour. This makes the product highly perishable with a short shelf life compared with gari and lafun, which are in granular form with moisture content below 10 per cent.

This report is to examine the financial viability or otherwise of establishing a Garri and odourless fufu flour production plant in Nigeria with cassava tubers as the raw materials.

The production capacity of the proposed plant is four (4) tons per day for three (3) shifts of eight (8) hours each working at 80% of the installed capacity for the garri while production capacity for the odourless fufu flour is three (3) tons per day for three (3) shifts of eight (8) hours each working at 80% of the installed capacity.