A NEW LEAF
Sue de Groot meets a dynamo doing wonders with lettuce
G loria Ramahlodi is a 33-yearold entrepreneur and mother of two, with a thousand-horsepower drive. Every weekday, she gets up at 3.30am to be at Joburg’s City Deep market by 5am. She selects fresh produce and drives it to her shop, Maledi Fresh at the Lifestyle Garden Centre in Randpark Ridge. Here, she and her three staff members wash, cut and package vegetables for sale to hotels, restaurants and the public.
Ramahlodi, who has a BSc in food science from Pretoria University, also consults to various companies and is a partner in Iceberg Lettuce, a new aboveground growing project near Tarlton in Gauteng. Here she is responsible for food safety and the strict packhouse controls required by Woolworths, which helped fund the project and for which the lettuce is exclusively produced.
Ramahlodi is one of three heroes in this story. The others are Johan van den Bosch, who owns the farm; and Stephen Silberman, whose vision has given us better summer salads.
Silberman’s career in agriculture started with Dewcrisp Farms in 1981 (where he later met Ramahlodi). “Over the years, I learnt that one of the biggest challenges in Southern Africa was to produce a good iceberg lettuce in summer,” he says.
Despite its popularity in salads, lettuce is a winter crop. In summer, when it is susceptible to heat, hail, rain, pests and disease, it becomes scarce and expensive.
“Depending on the season, a lettuce head can cost anything from R2 to R20,” says Silberman. “The average price on the independent market from December 2012 to March 2013 was R15 a head.”
In 2010, Silberman persuaded the Department of Agriculture to help him conduct trials that would enable the growing of a crisp lettuce in hot conditions. Iceberg is the generic name for crisp lettuce — there are close to 3 000 varieties. The Agricultural Research Council in Pretoria helped Silberman trial 27 varieties over a year.
“When I succeeded in producing lettuce in January and February, the two most difficult months, I knew I could go commercial with it. I took my plan to Johan and we set up a 1ha pilot plant adjoining his farm. Within a year, we had proved to Woolworths that we could provide them with top-quality crisp lettuce during the summer, when everyone wants to eat it but no one can grow it. We have just added two more hectares. We employ 30 people and, in the high season, we supply 5 000 lettuce heads a day to Woolworths stores.”
Ramahlodi, who at the time was quality assurance manager at Silberman’s Wigwam Foods, was closely involved in the trials. “Gloria had to test the samples I cut every week and record all the information pertaining to taste, shelf life and so on,” says Silberman. “She was the first person to know about this product. At that stage, she was an employee. Now she’s an equal shareholder in the business.”
“I used to pack and process lettuce for the hospitality industry,” says Ramahlodi, “so I knew about lettuce. When we tested this one, I could not believe the sweet taste, the colour and the shelf life.”
Silberman says because it is grown in gutters under cover and fed by a drip system controlled by a computer (the purchase of which was partly subsidised by the Dutch government), this lettuce has an enlarged cellular system, which gives it a crunchier bite and helps it last longer. Because it grows faster, it is harvested younger, which means the heart is not as tightly packed, allowing air to flow between the inner leaves and making it green all the way through.
Ramahlodi picks up a perfect head, peels off the outer leaves and bites into it with a smile. “With this one I believe we will go far,” she says.