Sidel and Niche Cocoa team up to supply safe and nutritious milk to millions of school children in Ghana

Niche Cocoa Industry Ltd., Ghana’s largest fully integrated cocoa processor, signed a deal with Sidel to support Ghana’s School Feeding Programme. Through the partnership, 5.6 million pupils will be provided with ready-to-drink chocolate milk, which is a healthy, nutritional alternative for students.

Niche Cocoa Industry Ltd., founded in 2011, is based in Tema, Ghana, and manufactures high quality, semi-finished cocoa products for export. Thanks to a loan from the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank FMO in the autumn 2019, Niche Cocoa was able to purchase equipment from Sidel, which will allow them to produce and bottle shelf-stable, fortified chocolate milk in PET for Ghanaian school children.

“Beverage production was a previously uncharted territory for us, therefore we decided to partner with Sidel because of our shared passion for uncompromising food and beverage quality,” says Edmund A. Poku, Managing Director at Niche Cocoa. “We are planning to serve approximately 5.6 million children across 261 districts in a total of 9,350 primary and secondary schools for 100 school days per year. With this programme, we want to provide a healthy, nutritional alternative to our people,” continues Poku.

Besides nutrition, food safety assurance is of utmost importance. Ultimately, Niche Cocoa opted for a safe and simple low-speed aseptic PET complete packaging line, which integrates Tetra Pak Processing Systems technologies and the Sidel Aseptic Combi systems Predis™ and Capdis™ with dry preform and cap sterilisation. With 180 installations worldwide, Sidel’s Aseptic Combi Predis is a well-proven solution that received U.S. FDA validation back in 2017.