Latest diet fad is good news
INA QUIET corner of the Isithebe Industrial Estate outside Mandeni, the latest diet fad has meant work for the unemployed and the success of a small company which will not only double its production but is investing about R50 million in refurbishing its factory.
Since sport scientist Tim Noakes released the book The Real Meal Revolution last year, consumption of coconut oil has grown fifteenfold in South Africa, resulting in the country’s only coconut oil refinery, which is based here in KwaZulu-Natal, doubling its staff and getting set for a massive upgrade by next year.
Similarly, traders in coconut oil are raking in profits.
Mike Quinn, who sells his refined coconut oil under the label Quinn’s Pure Coconut Oil, said demand for the product had grown in five years from 400 units a month to 12 000 units. And that demand, he said, was primarily linked to the release of Noakes’s book.
Noakes, together with Sally-Ann Creed, who is dubbed the “mind behind” the high-fat low-carb diet book, and chefs Jomo Proudfoot and David Grier, who wrote the book The Real Meal Revolution, promote the use of coconut flour and coconut oil for cooking.
Steve Wilson of Wilson’s Foods, an importer of refined coconut oil, said he attributed the growth in his sales “entirely” to Noakes’s book.
“I would guess, wildly, that consumption has grown fifteenfold over the last two years to maybe 600 000 litres a year,” he said.
Wilson said he was now investing R500 000 in upgrading of his distribution premises in the Western Cape as a result of the growth in demand.
But the real impact of the coconut oil’s heightened profile is being felt in Mandeni where a coconut oil refinery, built more than 10 years ago, is struggling to keep up with demand.
The factory, which is owned by Vida Oils International PCC, imports a large portion of its coconut oil from Mozambique.
Hennie du Plessis, the manager in charge of operations and logistics, said the company was struggling to cope with the demand.
He said job creation in the Mozambican industry had also rocketed, particularly as most of the coconut palms, planted about 60 years ago by the Portuguese, were now owned and harvested by smallscale farmers.
Philipp Crede of Crede Oils said demand for coconut oil had grown steadily since 2006 when the company first started selling the product for three main reasons.
“Over the last 10 years, there’s been a growing global awareness of the benefits of coconut oil, and like other global health trends, this interest has reached South Africa too. Tim Noakes’s Banting diet, which explicitly advocates the use of coconut oil, seems to have driven strong demand in the year since The Real Meal Revolution was first published. Coconut oil has become mainstream, and is now available in all major food retailers, which in turn makes it much more accessible to grocery shoppers,” he said.
Crede said the introduction of refined coconut oil at a much lower price point than virgin coconut oil had opened the market to a wider set of consumers.
He said the trends they were seeing in the coconut oil business were the high price of imported oils owing to a strong global demand as well as damage caused by Typhoon Haiyan to an estimated one third of coconut trees in the Phillipines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
Locally, he said, sales were increasing as large food retailers were stocking the products, and also because of a greater sophistication among consumers who were becoming aware of the product, its characteristic health benefits and the difference between virgin and refined coconut oils.
Other factors contributing to sales, he said, were the proliferation of brands as well as a growing acceptance of refined coconut oil which was cheaper than virgin coconut oil.