Juice making firm invests K20m

A Lilongwe-based juice making company, Nutri Com Services, has invested K20 million (US$62305) to purchase machines and other accessories to manufacture a new brand of juice known as Kombucha health drink.

Kombucha is a health juice made from honey, water, tea and mushroom culture and is said to help the liver to work efficiently, improve digestion, fight insomnia, colitis, and burn fats.

Nutri Com sales manager Peter Ndalama in an interview this week said demand for the new drink has compelled them to increase production and buy state-of-the-art machines.

“We are producing 1 000 cases per month. A small case contains 20 bottles while a big case contains 24 bottles. Our products have already been pre-certified by the Malawi Bureau of Standards (MBS) and the demand is increasing almost every day. “Initially, we were only supplying the drink in Lilongwe but now we have up-scaled and we are also delivering the drinks to other regions,” said Ndalama.

He said currently they are supplying districts such as Mzuzu, Kasungu, Mchinji, Mangochi, Blantyre and Ntcheu.

Ndalama said with the increase in demand, the company has employed 30 full time employees.

“We are currently overwhelmed with orders,” he said.

Some of the challenges the company is facing is the high price of honey and frequent power blackouts.

Ndalama said they want to export the drink to countries such as Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe to earn the country the much-needed foreign exchange.

Nutri Com is an example of a local company that is adding value to the country’s agriculture produce, a thing that has been lacking for quite some time.

In a bid to improve agro-processing and encourage value addition, government in the 2013/14 National Budget, indicated that agro-processing shall be designated as a priority industry for purposes of tax holiday as required under the Taxation Act, 11th Schedule.

But Finance Minister Ken Lipenga said since government deprives itself from revenues from corporate taxes by letting investors benefit from tax holidays, it is imperative that investors benefit under this provision to ensure that they remain committed to delivering the desired outputs such as production for export, value addition, employment creation and generation of foreign exchange for the economy.

He said government will closely monitor performance and is at liberty to withdraw the incentive where there is evidence of abuse or underperformance depending on the agreed benchmarks.