Caren Asamba is the co-founder of Samwa Natural Foods, selling gluten-free and low-sugar jamsamong other products.
In an interview, she mentioned that they established the company after her husband lacked market for passion fruits.
With no where to sell their produce, the couple teamed up and decided to add value to the fruits by making low-sugar jams.
Here is their story as told by WoK.
In an interview with KTN, Asamba noted that they had not planned to invest in the value-addition business.
She explained that her husband was into passion fruit farming, and used to supply to companies that made juices.
However, at some point, his clients claimed that they had enough leaving him with a lot of produce.
“It happens because that’s a common thing; when produce is in season, you find so many people have it and then the prices go down
“We had negotiated a fixed price and I think somebody supplied them with a lower price because there was plenty in market,” Asamba said.
Following the disappointing experience, the couple did research and decided to do value-addition of the fruits.
Their first product was the low-sugar jam made out of passion fruits.
“At the time, he was still in employment so we would make it and supply to his colleagues, relatives and some friends,” she explained.
Later, they made their second product; passion jam but without seeds.
“We decided to make our second product which was passion jam but without seeds because some people didn’t want to crunch the seeds while eating bread,” Asamba added.
After a while, Asamba noted that they realized that the jams were not sustainable and not most people were consuming it.
As such, they decided to diversify their portfolio and specifically went for products that were not available in the market.
“We decided to do Mango ketchup because when mangoes are in season they go to waste but because most people only know the tomato ketchup, we decided to take it by its horns and take a risk,” Asamba said.
Interestingly, the mango ketchup later turned to be their second most selling product after the cassava flour.
Samwa Natural Foods make a variety of products including gluten free breads, gluten free cookies and gluten free flours.
They also make chutneys, low-sugar marmalades, kachumbaris, dried fruits, dried vegetables, xantham gum and activated coconut charcoal.
