Senegal is experiencing extraordinary growth in the food sector. New small and medium-sized companies appear regularly, attracting ever more financing, and more and more of them are beginning to think seriously about the quality of their product. This is driven by increasing consumer demands, many of whom are willing to pay a premium for higher-quality foods.

Anyone who ever owned and operated a business knows that allocating a budget is a rigorous exercise, and every alternative benefit and cost needs to be carefully considered. Adding funds to one operational area always means taking them from another. And, if some cost can be sacrificed with relatively little pain, a company will likely do it.

Over the past couple of years, FES has been field testing solutions in Africa and South Asia that gives medium and small food businesses the wherewithal for improving their food safety culture, and thus the quality of the products they sell. On a practical level, this means that these food businesses want to invest in new technologies and processes, which means that they will incur extra costs. We recommend the more affordable such technologies (almost a hundred!) to our clients and will be sharing these with you on this blog.