Value Chain Unchained!
I started my day quite early with a debrief from Kakata, where my right and left hands, Francis and Sylvester, CEO and CFO of FABRAR respectively, had spent the night last night to lend a hand to the team at the factory.
The news was good and bad. The good news was that we’d loaded the truck with rice for BESTWA’s feeding program, and that truck had left the factory at 7:45 this morning. On the other hand, we couldn’t start the delivery to Mary’s Meals school feeding program because the bag printer had gone awol for the past week; and though we had empty bags, they were not printed with the NGO’s logo, as we’d contracted to do. The man arrived back in Kakata late last night and was starting on the printing by 8:00 this morning.
Thank God oh, but aye!
And while I was digesting that, my contractor making the sleeves for our 3-lb bags, Menekemu Design & Packaging, came with a mockup for me to approve. We’d been working on the design for the past two to three days.
“You’re our biggest customer,” he’d told me, “and right now, your business is keeping us going.”
No pressure; I beg!
This morning, I had a marketing meeting at one of the local supermarket chains...they wanted samples and were interested in buying from us. Again. Because they used to buy from us before, and treated our products not so nicely. “Dah new management, ma sistah!” Okay oh! Same faces there, but the new management placed a substantial order for next week.
I rush back elated to find out that we’re out of 1lb packets; and the order I placed with a courier service from the US may not get here for another couple of weeks. Aye Lord!
Look, it’s no secret that we’ve been busy with planting, weeding, and harvesting rice the last few months. In Liberia, November and December are peak times for rice production, even though there are some farmers and cooperatives who are cultivating lowland swamp rice throughout the year. The vast majority are like us. Plant in April-June; harvest in September-December.
Over the past three months though, finding locally grown rice has been very challenging. Which means to say, we couldn’t find much. Farmers were digging in their rice kitchens and selling us half a bag here; two bags there...old rice. And what rice we did find we were “meenching” on it, selling it small, small. And keeping all of y’all entertained with our rice growing stories.
This week, the doldrums ended. We insah nah, for true true!
Five truckloads of rice came down to us this week...all five from Lofa. Thank goodness we had pretty much wrapped up our harvests in and around Margibi...only busy now with threshing, drying and storing. Because this week FABRAR’s factory has been jumping. When rice comes from Lofa, you’d better have a spare warehouse!
Chay!
Some of the rice comes from our fellow rice processor, AIIC in Foya, so it’s already milled. That’s great, even though we run it through our machines to clean it to our standards before bagging it and selling it. But most of the rice we get comes in paddy form, packed in these super-sized bags they call ‘balawala bags’.
Every one of the suppliers, whether of milled rice or of paddy, represents dozens, sometimes hundreds of small farmers, all looking for some cash returns for their six+ months of labor.
And because we’ve broken down all three of our trucks on that Lofa road, they were forced to bring the rice down to us in Kakata. And every truck load had been brought down with the understanding that we’d need the standard 1-2 weeks to pay for the rice; but we would advance the cost of transport in cash, which would be deducted from the final tally.
See us scrambling today as three different trucks rolled up and we only had “transport cash” on hand for one! Truck drivers; car boys; farmers; aggregators; everybody was hoping for the cash respite, the first after months of go-slow. In fact as one supplier told me: “Ol Ma, dah only FABRAR we looking up to oh!”
You see, nobody else is buying this bountiful harvest right now. No government procurement for Christmas; no WFP; no big buyers...and FABRAR is the only one of the processors with strong links to retail and export markets.
And that got me thinking about the rice value chain that our government and partners love to discuss and plan around. Here is the value chain oh! From farmer, to aggregator, to processor via transporter -and all the small industries that feed those trucks to enable them to move on that Lofa road...then you have the car boys and other folks who load and unload the rice.
Get it to our factory and that’s not the end of the story. Because we have to offload, weigh, and store the rice; then ensure that the paperwork and inventorying is correctly done. Then pay the truck drivers and teams, and advance something to the aggregator bringing in the rice. Meanwhile, another team is hauling rice from warehouse to mill; milling it; bagging it and loading it up on our trucks to deliver to clients.
We have bag suppliers and bag printers; we have security and mechanics; we have fumigators and suppliers of wood to run our dryers and parboilers.
And down in Monrovia, another team is hand-sorting the rice and doing the last quality control before bagging and sealing the rice in retail sizes; then boxing them in cartons, ready for shipping. They make jam and spice, buying ingredients from the market or picking from our gardens. A part of the team makes sales calls and assemble the packages, while Vannette, our media & marketing expert, makes sure our products are appealing, and manages the online store
The cartons, the bags, the stickers are all part of the value chain; the utilities and internet: more links.
And of course there’s me...blogging y’all, and following up on the export side, and the online sales; ordering bags, and stickers, and packages; and generally all up in everybody’s fries.
All this to say that right now, today, today, our value chain is off the chain, so... We’ve got rice y’all!!
