By Business A.M.
West Africa’s foremost ground handling service provider, Nigerian Aviation Handling Company (nahco aviance), recorded a major first last Wednesday when it started the exportation of food items to Europe under its new subsidiary, NAHCO Food and Beverages Limited.
It commenced the exportation of fresh pepper after being certified by the Nigeria Agricultural Quarantine Service (NAQS) and after consultation with foreign food standards agencies.
The initiative has been touted by analysts as one that would revolutionise the way Nigeria’s produce are packaged for foreign markets.This feat is first by any major operator at the airport and comes on the back of aggressive push by the federal government for increased export of Nigerian products.
Indranil Gupta, group managing director and chief executive officer, nahco aviance, said this development was coming at a time when quite a number of stakeholders had identified packaging as a major challenge for Nigerian exports.
He added that the company is doing a lot to assist local producers of agric products in realising their dreams of exporting quality commodities to markets in Europe, America and Asia.
“We appreciate the hard work some of our farmers put into producing their goods. NAHCO is trying to support them to export these products so as to make these efforts more worthwhile for them. It is also a way of generating scarce foreign exchange for the country,” Gupta stated.
Explaining the process which led to the commencement of the food exports, Emmanuel Illah, senior business development manager, new business, nahco aviance, pointed out that the project is part of NAHCO’s larger expansions strategy driven by three major objectives: Growth, Risk Reduction and Portability.
According to Illah, the GMD/CEO of the company, Indranil Gupta, drove the initiative and has provided support and technical know-how so far.
Disclosing plans by the company to onboard new consignees/offtakers, Illah added, “the marketing campaign and planned roadshow will take care of this. We plan to expand the product range substantially in due course to accommodate the requests from the diaspora markets.”
