Kenyan Farmers Fight Food Loss By Drying, Selling Mangoes.

What do you get when you mix Kenyan mango farmers, a European food initiative, a German consulting firm, and a Kenyan health food company? Give up?? The answer, of course, is dried mango. (Kaushe maembe in Swahili.)

The article speaks on the joint project of SAVE Food, africon GmbH and the Messe Düsseldorf in Kenya.

How exactly did that come to pass? As you might suspect, it’s complicated. But it starts with a whole lot of wasted mangoes. More than half the crop—64 percent to be exact—never made it to market. That’s 300,000 tons of tasty, nutritious mangoes squandered every year in a country that, like most places, is no stranger to hunger. There are very few secondary markets. Somehow, it is cheaper to import mango pulp from India to make juice.

The next ingredient was a European yen to fight food waste through a practical project. That interest came from the SAVE FOOD initiative, which launched in 2011 as a collaboration between German exhibition organizer Messe Dusseldorf and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (and later the UN Environment Program). Messe Dusseldorf and SAVE FOOD hired africon, a German consulting firm specializing on Africa, to perform research on Kenyan food losses in 2013.

More on: africon in the National Geographic