Suspended for a few months, Zabbaan Holding, which markets local fruit juices, intends to take off for good this time with a resumption of its activity in July 2017. Its promoter, Aïssata Diakité, 28, has just concluded a partnership with the Azalaï hotel group and is preparing to open a subsidiary in France.
In October 2016, Aïssata Diakité set up a small factory in the popular district of Sébénikoro, known to house the presidential palace, west of Bamako. With three employees, she launched an activity there to produce hibiscus, ginger and mango juice. “Zabbaan is the juice of around 40 fruits, leaves and stems of trees,” explains the promoter.
Its bottles, sold for 1,000 CFA francs (1.50 euros), were initially intended for the Malian middle class, but initially found takers in restaurants and hotels. For four months, Aïssata and her colleagues supplied the restaurants and hotels in the Malian capital. At that time, it forecasted an annual turnover of 68,775,000 CFA francs (105,000 euros).
Resumption of production in May
But after four months of production, Zabbaan ceased operations due to a shortage of its limited stock of glass bottles. “Our bottles no longer returned from restaurants and hotels as expected,” explains Aïssata Diakité, an engineer trained in an agro-food school in Picardy (in the north of France) “.
“We then stopped. Let’s say that 2016 was a test year for us ”, relativizes the young Malian. In December 2016, Aïssata returned to Europe to better organize the production of her start-up, before returning to Bamako at the beginning of April, where she intends to relaunch her production next May.
“Some details had to be rethought, like printing the new labels printed in Germany and a new bottle shape, then re-bottling. Because, this time, our bottles will be plastic and not glass as for the first production, ”explains Aïssata Diakité.
My priority was to start in Bamako.
At the end of her studies in France, Aïssata Diakité received a project from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to study the feasibility of her project, then obtained a guarantee from a Malian bank. In July 2016, Zabbaan was selected among the 10 best start-ups in the French-speaking world by the International Organization of La Francophonie. The company moved to Bamako in August of the same year.
“I started with an investment of 200,000 euros. My priority was to start in Bamako at any cost despite the opportunities that were offered to me in France or in the Ivory Coast because it is a Malian start-up, ”she explains proudly. Indeed, the name Zabbaan was given to the company in memory of her childhood years in the central region of Mopti, where she would go into the bush to pick zaban (grain fruit).
And as the company prepares to resume production in Mali, it has recruited five new employees and eight others on work-study contracts. The salaries of three of them will be covered by the Agency for the Promotion of Youth Employment. Zabbaan will soon have a bottling line with a capacity of 1,000 liters per hour, on its way from Europe.
A highly courted company
“We are going to launch our production in earnest next May in partnership with the Azalaï hotel group and we will start with the production of 625 liters, or 2,500 bottles of fruit juice per day,” explains Aïssata Diakité.
His phone keeps ringing, and the news is pretty good. At the end of the line, Malian distributors but also restaurant purchasing managers in France.
“I am going to open a subsidiary there in collaboration with Bond’Innov [incubator based in Bondy in the suburbs of Paris] to both supply the French market, but also to continue research to improve the quality of our products and also work on the project. of a new range of Zabbaan juices, without sugar ”.
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