As Nigerian bakers struggle with high cost of raw materials in the production of bread, coupled with supply deficit of wheat due to Ukraine-Russia war, stakeholders have asked Nigerian bakers to seek alternative ingredients for the production of bread, adding Nigeria’s orange fleshed potato is readily available to substitute wheat flour in the production of bread in good proportion rather than struggling with flour scarcity.
Nigerian bread bakers had on Thursday, last week, announced four days withdrawal of services due to high cost of production and some harsh government policies.
Managing director of Nextar Bakery, Mrs Bukola Adewumi who spoke with me on their plight and the high expenses customers have to deal with, lamented that they cannot cope doing business with the high cost of raw materials for making bread.
She added that many of her colleagues have shutdown their businesses because many Nigerian cannot afford high cost of bread arising from high cost of production.
“Doing business with the high cost of raw materials is not easy in Nigeria. A lot of bakeries can no longer cope and this has forced some of the bakeries to shutdown.
Before now the price of bread was between 500 to 600. Now, most breads sell for 700 to 1000. How many Nigerians can afford this? We are begging the federal government to please help bread industry so that they can continue production. We are employers of labour, if the bakeries close down, where do you want the workers to go? Some of them have people depending on them,” Mrs Adewumi said.
However, the national president of Potato Farmers Association of Nigeria (POFAN), Chief Daniel Okafor, told me that the federal government is not serious in implementing policies that will help develop potato value chain, and urged bakers and stakeholders to embrace the orange fleshed sweet potato flour to make bread.
“Bakers can mix the orange fleshed sweet potato with vitamin A cassava and 20 per cent wheat to bind and do bread with. We don’t need to import wheat to do bread because orange fleshed sweet potato flour can do everything, only that we need to promote it.
“Since government has refused to promote it, I’m calling every stakeholder to join potato value chain and support farmers to work and make the flour available for bread making,”Chief Okafor said.
A bread consumer, Miss Deborah Yakubu told me that though they are not finding it easy coping with the high cost of bread, she wants bakers to look inward and seek alternative to wheat rather than waiting endlessly for favourable government policies.
“ We can’t trust government to help us again, so I urge bakers to look for more locally produced ingredients to make bread”, she said.
