Bidco Africa begins constructing beverage plant in Kenya - kenyadetails

Bidco Africa begins constructing beverage plant in Kenya

Bidco Africa which manufactures daily consumer products has began the construction of  a US$ 40m beverage plant in Kenya with commissioning planned for mid 2017.

The new beverage plant in Kenya, to be constructed in Thika will comprise of a production and bottling facility for non-carbonated still drinks, carbonated soft drinks and water and will be funded by theInternational Finance Corporation (IFC).

Bidco Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Vimal Shah confirmed the reports and said that the upcoming beverage plant is part of an expansion plan that will see the company consider going into other manufacturing streams as it looks to grow its business four-fold from the whopping US$500m annual turnover.

“The groundbreaking for the soft drink factory was conducted in February but the actual construction started early this month, we had hoped that the plant would be operational by the end of this year but some regulatory hurdles have forced us to move that target to around June of next year,” said Mr. Shah.

Bidco’s new beverages factory will have two processing lines and each will have a capacity of producing 24,000 bottles per hour; this is according to report published by the IFC in 2014 when it was considering giving the firm a loan for the project. Another separate plant will produce about 100 million plastic bottles per year.

The estimated annual production capacity of the soft drinks plant is 50 million litres to be split among the different product lines such as energy, sports drinks, and smoothies (with and without milk).

Bidco Africa, which was founded in 1970 as a garments factory, controls more than 60 per cent of the cooking fat market and 54 per cent of the cooking oil market in Kenya; it currently manufactures edible oils, cooking fats, soaps, baking powder, animal feeds and detergents.