Small Scale Exportation of Foodstuff

Small Scale Exportation of foodstuff involves selling or exporting of food items in small quantity to countries where we have a lot Nigerians in the Diaspora such as US, UK, Canada, Italy, Spain, UAE etc.

According to a report done by PWC, as of 2017, there was an estimated amount of 15 million Nigerians living abroad. Have a look at the estimated numbers of Nigerians in the countries on this table.

I have personally spoken to a Nigerian exporter that has the opportunity to export dried honey beans to the UK at much cheaper rates than what they usually get from Brazil. For those of you that are not aware, dried honey beans are used in many Nigerian dishes such as moi moi. For this opportunity you do not need to make extremely large orders to make a healthy profit. All you need is to share a container going out of the country to get favourable shipping rates. We will go into that in a later chapter.

Here are the foodstuffs that you can export to foreign Countries:
Smoked fish, Garri, Beans Flour, Melon seed (Egusi Ground), Ogbono, Cassava Flour, Bitter leaf, Dried Ugu leaf, Palm wine, Hibiscus flower, Yoghurt, Pap (Ogi), Ukazi leaf

Others include:
Hot Chili Pepper, Ground, Kola nut, Potato, Semolina, Ginger beer, Soybean, Groundnut, Okra, Cassava, Yam, Honey, Snail, Bitter Kola, Ofada rice, Catfish, Shrimps, Pounded Yam Flour, Poultry, Fruit juice, Cashew, Plantain Flour, Palm Oil.

Here is an idea of the kind of returns you can get from certain products. (Please bear in mind this may change depending on when you watch this)

1 KG of Egusi is sold for $4 here in Nigeria but it’s sold for $20 in the
international commodity market.

1KG of Bitter Kola is sold for $2 in Nigeria but it’s sold for $20 in the
international commodity market.

1 metric ton of Okra is $200 – $400 here in Nigeria, but it’s sold for $4,000 –
$6,000 in the international commodity market.
5 pieces of plantain is sold for less than 200 naira in mile 12 market in Lagos but sold for 5000 naira in the UAE.

The good thing about this is business is that it requires very little investment to start.

What you need to start
In order to start mini exportation of foodstuff you need the following:
• Products to sell
• Contact of Foreign Buyers that you can sell to
• Nigeria bank Account, email address and smartphone
• Export License if possible

ALTERNATIVE WAY TO STARTING MINI EXPORTATION BUSINESS

1. Starting in a medium scale: What I mean when I say medium scale is that, in addition to the above listed requirement, we suggest you also have the following, if you can afford to start on this level:
   • Registered Business name
   • Nafdac Registered products as this will enable us to avoid quality control issues.
   • A simple professional website where you showcase your products as this will put you above
   your competitors.
2. Ecommerce Approach: You simply create an ecommerce shop like amazon or jumia.com where Nigerian foodstuff will be displayed. When you have a shop like this anyone from anywhere at anytime can visit your website site and request for any of the food items listed. As soon as you receive the order, you then go to the regular market to source, shop, package and ship the items.
3. Social Media Approach: This approach you can start with zero capital. Just go on facebook and create a business page. Do the same thing for Instagram, create a business account. Next step is to post consistently with nice caption Nigerian food stuff you can source, shop and ship to
   anyone abroad. In this approach, you are simply helping the person to shop the items and so you only charge them for your service which can be 30k, 40k or more depending on your negotiating power. The individual pays you to buy to item.Then you can handle the goods to his preferred shipping agent for shipment.