MAUNGO CRAFT TURNS INDIGENOUS FRUITS INTO DELICIOUS JAMS

While

a number of bread spreads in local retailers’ shelves are made from imported products, two Botswana business owners are looking to use local inputs as much as possible.

A jam-making local business, Maungo Craft, a brainchild of Olayemi Aganga and Bonolo Monthe, is dedicated to utilising indigenous fruits to produce of different varieties.

Maungo Craft currently operates out of the Local Enterprise Authority (LEA) Kutla Incubation Centre in Gaborone. It has a workforce of six people; three full time employees, two co-owners and a media liaison person.

The company’s product range includes Nana Jam, Mara Mara Jam, Kiwi Jam, Child of the Moon Marmalade, Kalahari Sands Marmalade and their latest product, a Morula hot sauce. The products mainly have Morula as the key ingredient.

“We started in 2017 as we saw the fruit was falling everywhere and we didn’t think the people were using it, but there was value in the fruit especially when you go to the stores and see your strawberry jams, your apricot jams and the likes,” Aganga said, speaking of Maungo Craft’s origins.

Aganga pointed out that they started working on formulas using indigenous fruits and visited farmers’ markets where they were told the business would be slow as they were new to the industry. He added that surprisingly their products started garnering public attention. In the process, this led to positive growth, and subsequently receiving recognition by winning awards.

The co-owner revealed that they played with, and fused culture with contemporary flavours to make their products unique and hot favorites for those who had tasted them. Maungo Craft specialized in making the tastiest award-winning, handcrafted, low sugar preserves packed with what they call Orphan Crops and Super foods.

So far, the company has bagged 11 awards, both locally and internationally, with the cherry on top being a gold medal hey were bestowed with at The World Marmalades in the United Kingdom for the Commonwealth Category. Their products have also been endorsed by Martha Stewart, an iconic chef and judge on the FOOD channel’s Chopped show.

The preserves work well on the breakfast table, can be used ed in baking, ng, cooking g or making g salads, as s they add d another r dimension to the flavour in all the dishes, very much akin to the Tswana cultural culinary experience.

The preserves are a product of experiments by the Maungo craft team to develop new flavors. They urge consumers of their products to experiment with the flavours of their products with their different dishes.

Aganga also said they were looking to expand the brand into other products in order to reach a wider customer base. He said to get 12 tons of oil they have to use 300 tons of morula fruit. The bottomline is that they wan want to create an ecosystem wh where when the they grow as company the people so sourcing the fruit will also grow.