An agriculture e-grocery expert, Mrs Saudat Salami, has lamented the poor system of the value-chain across all agriculture sector in the country.
Salami, the Chief Executive Officer of Easyshop, Easycook Services Ltd., said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday in Lagos.
A value chain is a business model that describes the full range of activities needed to create a product or service.
The purpose of a value-chain analysis is to increase production efficiency so that a company can deliver maximum value for the least possible cost.
The Agroprenuer noted that creating an app to sell agro produce was not enough as the poor value-chains was a setback to the growth of the sector.
“Owing to the challenges most women face in balancing work and the home front, we developed an app to help anyone shop fresh agro- groceries online.
“We sell and deliver fresh agro-produce to people across Nigeria through our online platform. We have been in operation since 2005 and have been linking farmers to the people.
“When we started the business, we did not intend to go fully into agriculture. I came in as a programmer, web developer and a trainer.
“We have observed that there were no structures to support the application that we had.
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“The value-chain across the agriculture sector is really poor and ineffective; we need to unlearn and relearn new approaches to boost each value-chain,” she said.
Salami also attributed the reoccurrence of food waste in the country to poor value-chains from the farm to the market.
According to her, most agro-produce need to be sorted out properly before delivery to avoid further food waste hence, the need to boost our value-chains.
“When we buy the fresh produce from Mile 12 or any market, we cannot deliver direct to our customers because there will be a lot of waste.
“When you buy a basket of tomatoes, there will be only 75 per cent that are good inside the basket. When you buy a lot of fruits, a number of them are not good, so we have to select.
“We also discovered a lot of food waste comes from the farm because of inefficiency in the value-chain system. There is no sorting or grading of most food items that come from the farms.
“If we must be successful in the agriculture sector, we need to understand the challenges of the farmers, we have observed them first hand and they are not doing very well.
“We discovered that we have to set up a cleaning center, a parking center, and be more involved from where the food comes from before delivery,” Salami said.
(NAN)
