Why the company exists

Most agricultural produce leaving this country passes through several hands before it reaches a port. A collector buys from farmers, an aggregator buys from collectors, an exporter buys from the aggregator. Each step adds a margin and removes information, and by the end nobody can say which village a consignment came from.

There is a second cost, quieter than the first. When a chain is long, the price signal reaching the person who actually gathered the crop is weak and late. They are told what they will be paid rather than agreeing it, and they find out at the point of sale rather than before the season. That is not sustainable in the plain sense of the word: people stop doing work that pays unpredictably.

That matters commercially, not just morally. A buyer in Europe who cannot trace a shipment cannot make claims about it, and a shipment that fails a test cannot be narrowed down to the batch that caused the problem. What we test, and why.

The consumer goods side grew out of the same routes. Trucks that came south loaded with shea were going north empty, and the traders we bought from were often connected to the shops that needed supplying. Running both directions is what makes the economics work on roads a one-way distributor cannot afford.

None of this makes us large. We are a small company doing a specific thing carefully, and the ambition is not to become a commodity house that moves everything. It is to be the supplier a serious buyer keeps, because the shipments arrive as described. What we check.

Today we serve buyers in West Africa and overseas, from single containers to standing monthly volumes. The markets we serve.