The outfit keeps stretching and bending backwards with innovation, creativity and expansion to solve a problem it created 10 years ago when it started operation with one production line in Ikeja Lagos.
That task it set for itself was positive however, and that is the delight to make a good product and sustain it. And to a large extent, the company seems to have kept the mandate with sustained quality standards that earned it an ISO Standardization accreditation recently. The product has not lost an inch of its quality, therefore consumers have not relented in keeping faith with it.
What the spill-over effect has been is the movement from one production line to six within the period and expansion in several areas like storage silos and other raw materials plants, alternative gas power, and a target to go integrative and composite – making all allied products for the biscuits plant – cartons, wrappers which all come under packaging and some other affiliated productions to make the task easier.
At the premises of the factory in Agbara, a beautiful environment, the Chief Executive, Obi Ezeude pointed at a queue of trucks and explained to Daily Sun that they are waiting to load and move the products to the Apapa Port for export to some ECOWAS countries with landing in Ghana. He said: “It is very official and we are tapping into the benefits of the ECOWAS community on movement of goods, and if other parts of the world would export their commodities to our region, there is nothing wrong in we do the same to our neighbouring countries rather than the illegal movement some agents involve in. And with time, when we would have overcome the production pressure that stretches us, we hope to take it further to the East and Southern Africa.
Beloxxi Industries as part of its efforts to consolidate and make more progress to meet the demands of the market on August 1 last year sold minority shares of $80m to a consortium of some foreign firms, proceeds of which the management said had been integrated into the expansions and yet to make the needed impact of satisfying the consumer base.
The latest of the efforts to take its operations higher, Ezeude said last week, was that the management of the organization concluded plans to commence another expansion phase that budgets to boost the company with N6b or US$18.5m and after which the workforce would rise tremendously to 5500 from the present employment pool of 2500.
Also, from the current six production lines, the factory would stretch to nine lines with boosted production capacity of 80,000 metric tonnes of biscuits per year from the 50,000 metric tones today.
The new steps would be announced on May 1 and meant to serve as impetus, according to him to make Nigerians invest more as a way of reviving the economy away from recession.