By: Zandile Majavu
Since winning R50,000 from Business Partners Limited’s SME Toolkit last month, Calab Baloyi has started moving to grow his Nosso-Sunflower organic oil cooking product. Baloyi who owns the agro-processing company, Themba Ntasko Projects, recently partnered with a micro innovation hub facility, eKasiLabs. It assisted Nosso-Sunflower Oil with brand development and provided a working space to ensure that the cooking oil production was Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) compliant.
The organic oil is produced in the township region of Orange Farm. Baloyi nurtured the business idea two years ago after he was retrenched during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic from a company where he worked as a senior sales consultant.“We initially started as a crop production company, selling Fordhook Giant spinach in 2021, selling to street vendors, and eventually to Boxer supermarkets in Orange Farm, Eyethu Mall. “But due to a lack of land, I had to think of ways to grow the company and generate enough income for the business, hence, I developed sunflower oil production, where we can outsource the sunflower seeds and deal with the production process,” Baloyi told Vutivi News.
He said he saw a gap in the township market for the production of goods from scratch, and he firmly believes that entrepreneurs should develop their own products and not settle for reselling or being the middleman. “So, I looked and researched for an everyday product everybody uses daily, and… we partnered with the Gauteng Department of Agriculture and Rural Development and managed to get the relevant knowledge and skills in the field,” he said.
Baloyi named the organic oil after his daughter Ntsako, which means happiness, so Nosso represents Ntsako Organic Sunflower Oil. “Currently, we have five employees, including myself. Initially, when we started, I was alone in the business, I found out about the business plan competition under some toolkit page with gives advice for emerging entrepreneurs, so they posted about the business plan competition.
“I thought I had this amazing idea, and I have been working on it for over two years, whereby I have already bought the oil extraction machines, but now I was missing the production inputs like seeds, buckets, and branding. So, when I won the competition, I felt that now is the time to complete the Nosso Project and put the product on the market,” Baloyi said. He used his winnings for nutritional tests, and additional chemistry and microbiological tests, branding, packaging, and other operational inputs.
Baloyi’s business has over 80 B2B clients. When it acquires a bigger machine, it will be able to supply more clients and move to other Gauteng townships. When Baloyi started his business, he had no funds to start his company, and many people did not believe “that a young man from a township could create such a product.”.
However, after creating a small sample he took it to the Vaal University of Technology along with the department. He pitched for a competition and was recruited for a one-year incubation period, he was able to use funds from that competition to purchase the oil extraction machine.
And that was the game-changer for Baloyi. When asked about the profitability of his business, Baloyi said: “The current machine we use can process eight tons of sunflower seeds per month, which is a gross of R120,000 and a net of R31,000.”
