Our main exporter is Bird’s Eye Chilli Pepper (Capsicum annum) – a very high pungency fruit also known as the rocket demon. This is carefully grown in our fields all year round and mainly exported to our European market. The fruits mature from medium green to bright red with uniform fruit quality.
A distinct feature is its smooth walls and hotness, which renders it economical to consumers.
Most of our Bird’s Eye Chilli Pepper is a relative of the Tabasco pepper and one of the hottest pepper varieties found globally, and is used in organic pest control sprays, and in making pepper sprays and tear gas. The pepper is also marketed locally as a condiment or spice for seasoning and stimulating appetite and considered for local medicines especially for herbal practitioners for ointments to cure rheumatism and joint pains.
Sugar is a carbohydrate that has been used as an ingredient in food for thousands of years. Evidence suggests that people in New Guinea domesticated the sugarcane plant as far back 8,000 BC and that civilisations in Asia began extracting sugar from the crop shortly thereafter.
Today, consumers use sugar to flavour foods such as chocolates, to help retain moisture in baked goods such as cakes and to preserve and gel other foods including jellies and jams. Sugar also can be used to make ethanol fuel. These diverse applications make sugar an important commodity on the global markets.
We trade high quality refined and raw Icumsa 45 from Brazil. Our VHP sugar originates from sugarcane farms in Brazil with trade across the Middle East, North Africa and Indonesian markets.
Maize (Zea mays), also called corn, is believed to have originated in central Mexico 7000 years ago from a wild grass, and Native Americans transformed maize into a better source of food. Maize contains approximately 72% starch, 10% protein, and 4% fat, supplying an energy density of 365 Kcal/100 g and is grown throughout the world, with the United States, China, and Brazil being the top three maize‐producing countries in the world, producing approximately 563 of the 717 million metric tons/year.
Our white maize comes from the West African Regions can be processed into a variety of food and industrial products, including starch, sweeteners, oil, beverages, glue, industrial alcohol, and fuel ethanol. In the last 10 years, the use of maize for fuel production significantly increased, accounting for approximately 40% of the maize production in the United States. As the ethanol industry absorbs a larger share of the maize crop, higher prices for maize will intensify demand competition and could affect maize prices for animal and human consumption. Low production costs, along with the high consumption of maize flour and cornmeal, especially where micronutrient deficiencies are common public health problems, make this food staple an ideal food vehicle for fortification.
