Willowton Group, South Africa’s largest sunflower seed crusher and producer of cooking oil, margarine, candles and soap, and global commodities giant Louis Dreyfus have launched a multimillion-rand rice cleaning and packing facility in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal (KZN).

The launch, which took place earlier this month, also marked the conclusion of a joint venture (JV) company, Allsome Brands, which would leverage the international partner’s expertise in trading grains, oilseeds, rice, sugar, ethanol, coffee, cotton and citrus fruit to grow the basket of products in the future. Louis Dreyfus, whose global turnover tops $60-billion, is also active in the biofuels industry and trades in ocean freight; metals, such as copper and cobalt; and financial instruments.

Louis Dreyfus Commodities CE Serge Schoen described the new Allsome Brands plant as a flagship project that was a first in the region for the company. The rapidly expanding market for food, as well as other commodities in Africa, made the investment in this plant, as well as further investments, a must.

He pointed out that 70% of the three-million tons of rice that the group trades globally each year ended up on the plates of African families.

Schoen said Louis Dreyfus would take a multicommodity approach to growth in the region. “We want to grow across the value chain and we are finding that, as Africa grows, strong brands and access to supermarket shelves are becoming more and more crucial.”

Both companies said the partnership allowed them to draw on core competences. In the case of Louis Dreyfus, this extends “from farm to fork”, with the company leveraging extensive experience in dealing in highly volatile world commodities markets.

Louis Dreyfus operates in 90 countries globally and has a strong African presence. Although it has an African head office in Gauteng, much of its business has been focused on the rest of Africa.

Willowton sales and marketing director Shoaib Moosa said, because Louis Dreyfus was the world’s largest rice merchandiser, this seemed the logical entry point for the JV. He added that Willowton had been a client of Louis Dreyfus for a number of years and that the group had approached it to set up Allsome Brands.

“We saw this as a natural cate- gory extension to our current brands and an exciting venture into new territory. Willowton Group has grown from a family business into a significant producer of edible oil-based products. We believe that our knowledge of the South African fast-moving consumer goods industry – from a production, logistics, sales and marketing perspective – will ensure that the new brand succeeds,” he said.

The aim is to establish Allsome as the mother brand spanning a number of foodstuffs, and to slot in a variety of subbrands serving different segments of the market beneath this.

The new packing facility, which is situated at Willowton’s existing KZN facility, measures 7 000 m2 and processes 10 000 t/d of rice. It has created 50 new permanent jobs.

Willowton technical director Ali Akbar Moosa said the plant was sourced both locally and from Italy, with Louis Dreyfus working with local experts to plan and build the facility.

He said the plant was currently working a single-shift, five-day week. There is sufficient space to double the size of the Pietermaritzburg operation. The JV plans to quickly increase production by introducing a seven-day, double-shift week that would more than double capacity.

In addition, Moosa said there were also advanced plans in place to create a second facility elsewhere in the country to limit “geo- graphical constraints” by the first quarter of 2014. This would increase employment to 200.