Ndiho Media

By Paul Ndiho

Nestle the world’s leading nutrition, health and Wellness Company will invest 70 million US dollars in Nigeria this year to grow its food business. And the multinational company and plans to expand its distribution network in one of Africa’s biggest economies.

Swiss transnational food and Beverage Company headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland — and perhaps the largest food company in the world, is set to invest 70 million dollars in its local subsidiary in Nigeria.

In the past six years, the company has invested 400 million us dollars into its food and cereals business in Nigeria

As part of its efforts to expand its distribution base, nestle Nigeria launched 10 mobile vans in Nigeria’s commercial capital this year. It’s also looking to capitalize on Nigeria’s booming internet retailers, to develop online sales capacity.

The mobile vans would be stationed at housing estates and colleges with large populations and little retail presence.

“Over many years we have managed to build a formidable sales structure and route to market. Ideally the strength of that is really finding local partners and local partners I mean, local Nigerian distributors who have their own businesses across the spectrum, so today we have over 70 distributors who we consider to be partners and together we invest in improving the skills, so we do a lot of training, a lot of development, we bring new sales tools to assist them, we teach good practices in terms of distribution, in terms of warehousing so our model is really “

Nestle’s seasoning product, Maggi, reaches 20 million Nigerian consumers every year. The company hopes to sell even more of the product by reaching into the growing towns and villages, using the mobile vans.

“If you think about the challenges every business has, it’s containing operating cost and becoming more efficient, becoming smarter at the way you procure raw materials, driving efficiency in manufacturing is certainly the strategy because at the end of the day, the consumer will not pay for our waste and the more inefficient we are, it means that we have another option of what is in existing price and this is not what we believe and we believe that consumers seek value and one of the ways we will deliver value in addition to doing things right in terms of the nutrition, in terms of having healthier tastier choices is to drive down cost which means you can offer consumers better value at more competitive pricing,”

Nestle is also investing 25 million US dollars this year to double its water bottling capacity in Nigeria to 200,000 liters, as it tries to meet growing demand in the north of the country and expand its 6 percent market share.