Macaroni & Pasta

Description

At present, there are about 20 different companies producing pasta. Among them, Kaliti Foods Share Company and Dire Dawa Food Complex (Ddfc) are the bigger ones, both availing themselves of Italian technologies and equipments. The first company, located in Addis Ababa, has a productive capacity of 24 tons per hour, both for short and long pasta. Ddfc is located in Dire Dawa town, next to the border with Djibouti. Its capacity is about 40 and 33 tons per hour, for short and long pasta respectively. Future trends are extremely promising for pasta, considering that the population is huge (over 90 millions) and the presence of pasta on the table of families is considerably increas ing. It is gradually replacing the traditional dish, injera. A yearly consumption of 5 kg per capita can be foreseen, especially in the growing urban areas where citizens are adopting new lifestyles, for which pasta is perfect, because it is fast, easy, cheap and enjoyable, thanks to the creative and multiple ways of cooking it offers.

Raw materials

In the last decade, a major limiting factor for local pasta-makers has been the low supply of durum wheat in the country. Few production with inadequate quality. Therefore pasta makers had to buy huge and homogeneous amounts from abroad. This situation may seem quite paradoxical, because wheat is a very traditional crop in Ethiopia, with a sowing of over 1.6 million of hectares. The point is that the 3.5 million tons produced annually are nearly exclusively made of soft wheat, and not durum. Moreover, this production is provided by millions of small farmers through a complex net of intermediaries that aggregate the produce by volumes, and not by quality. As a consequence, industries have been forced to rely on import for durum wheat and therefore they have been affected by the huge import costs and by the recurrent scarcity of hard currency in the Ethiopian bank system. But the internal demand of pasta is not yet fulfilled, so a huge importation of pasta is taking place.