The process of harvesting, packaging and transporting high-quality onions requires a high level of effort, and coordination and some luck. We’ll explore the entire process from identification of the quality to shipping so you can understand how.
Hello, there.
I’m Samwel Njora, Purchase manager at AmoebaX Limited, YasaFi is our service name. After graduation from the University of Nairobi, Kenya. I participated in various research Industries ranging from consumer insight, Opinion polls, market research e.t.c. Later, I was employed as a research assistant at SBO Research Limited before joining AmoebaX Limited in June 2017.
As manager of purchase team, I would like to share with you our story;
YasaFi has been in a chance to meet with more than 1,000 farmers in the first year of its operation. We interact with our farmers when we visit their areas during research or through our facebook page https://web.facebook.com/AmoebaYasaFi/
We as Yasafi start our purchase plan by conducting a farm visit two months after planting and two weeks to harvesting. This comes after contacting our farmers and assigning our representatives to do a follow up as an in charge.
We understand that, during this time, the plants are being nurtured and taken care of consistently.
Which is an important part of the process, for growing high-quality Onions. We do this to monitor the progress and the crop cultivation measures as well as being assured of the quality before the time of harvesting and gather general information concerning the history of the farm for our own records.
Most farmers agree with us that it feels we are doing farming together because even before harvest they are assured of a ready market.
Most farmers were never used to that before and it seemed to bother them at first. After doing our second visit we commit to buying the onions and have an agreement, we discuss the possibility to buy and set the prices depending on the prevailing farmgate prices as well as the quality of the onions. We then agree on the sorting criteria which are mainly grade I onions with sizes ranging from Tiny-Small-Medium-Large. We do it as a requirement from our customers.
We also agree on the mode of payments which includes Mpesa, Bank transfer and sometimes cash.
Upon agreeing on these factors we set the day we can come to take the onions though its subject to change depending on the prevailing weather condition. In our understanding, the quality of onions vary from one area to another depending on prevailing weather condition as well as the time of the year. It took us one year to re-realize this fact. As a result, we do buy onions from all areas currently in Kenya and Tanzania depending on time of the year as well as our customers' preferences.
We pay the farmer mainly from the finance incharge using the modes indicated before as agreed with the farmer.
After payment has been done and the farmer confirms he/she can allow us to transport the onions to our warehouse using our trucks. The onions are delivered to the inventory management which confirms the quality as well as the amount delivered.
The good quality of Yasafi onions is the culmination of their long journey through both natural and technological environments, as well as the hard work of lots of farm workers.
We hope to keep improving as we focus to provide good quality onions to our customers as we enable farmers to make more profit with onion farming.
Samwel Njora, Purchase Manager