Award winners are an inspiration

Every year the PhytoTrade Africa awards remind us just how much incredible work is being done by southern African people to develop natural products ethically and sustainably. This year was no exception. We are delighted that the judges picked WildFoods of Botswana, and its director Frank Taylor, to win the 2008 Natural Product Award. For many years Frank has inspired us by dedicating himself to a business that both uplifts local communities and cares for the environment. His new range of innovative products is attracting well-deserved interest from the likes of Air Botswana and we hope that the R20,000 award will help him move on to even greater achievements. Congratulations too to Red Cedar of South Africa which won our Best In Show Award and the prize of R10,000 at the Natural & Organic Products Exhibition in Cape Town. Red Cedar is run by a team of six previously unemployed women from Wupperthal. The business, started as a USAID-funded Black Economic Empowerment project, is now a thriving concern producing very high quality, beautifully packaged rooibos products. We wish them every success. It is always good to hear from previous award winners about how the award has helped them to move their businesses forward. Last year, Elephant Pepper won the Natural Product award for its Baobab Gold Chilli Sauce. Elephant Pepper director Loki Osborn says, ‘While the media coverage of our award win helped to excite distributors about our products, the prize money enabled us to promote our sauce and ride the wave of European interest in baobab. We’ve also used the cash to bring forward the development of new products. ‘The award came at an important time for us and the continued support from Phytotrade Africa has helped us both on a technical level and in marketing and promotion as well.’

Baobab buzz...

Work is progressing to get baobab fruit pulp powder and extract certified as "generally recognised as safe" (GRAS) by the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA). A dossier will submitted soon and the GRAS certification - expected in around six months - will be central to us marketing baobab successfully as a safe food ingredient in the US. Again with eyes on the US market, our market development manager Cyril Lombard and Chief Exec Gus Le Breton will be heading to the States for the Supply Side West trade show in Las Vegas, October 22-24. "This is the world's largest exhibition of healthy and innovative ingredients, so a really important opportunity for us," says Cyril. "We'll be focusing on generating US commercial interest in baobab and devil's claw." Meanwhile in London, July's publicity blitz has resulted in a surge of manufacturer enquiries about baobab fruit pulp. Billy Smith, marketing manager at our commercial partners Afriplex, will fly to London in October to join PhytoTrade Africa's Rosie Abdy Collins at a series of meetings with interested companies. We can't mention them here (for obvious commercial reasons) but they include some top names and we're confident that the UK's first baobab products will soon be in the pipeline.