Flour Power

In 2020, we sold over 672,000 units of bread! While we use several unique ingredients such as sweet potatoes, carrots, and beets to make our goodies, flour remains as a staple ingredient. In 2021 the projected range for the cost of wheat flour is between $0.60 and $0.65 per kilogram. Last year, we spent $0.45 - $0.50 amount on flour per kilogram. And last year, we purchased 36,800 kilograms of flour. That’s a lot of flour!

As we grow our bakeries we have tested out various suppliers to test out different varieties of flour, different distribution methods, and varying storage methods. We quickly learned that this process posed several challenges in terms of budgeting and projecting our costs. And - we wanted to control the cost of our baked goods by making sure that these costs do not constantly fluctuate with the rise of our raw ingredients.

The first step to addressing these challenges was to find a reliable supplier. One trend that we noticed is that sometimes the cost of flour would change drastically from week to week. This inspired Charlotte, our program manager in Gicumbi, to think creatively about how we could make the switch to buying a month’s supply of flour at once. Though buying flour in bulk has proven to be lucrative, it comes with its own set of challenges.

Charlotte shares some insight on some of the new hurdles we face as we adapt to our new system of buying flour in bulk:

“We now have different challenges including storage space shortage to store the additional goods but we decided to use one part of an office room plus a little storage room to overcome this challenge. Another challenge is transportation because we used the TWB car to deliver the flour from Kigali to Gicumbi. As you might know, Kigali was in lockdown prohibiting travel between Kigali and other districts, except for the transport of goods. To overcome this challenge, I came up with an idea of renting a truck for delivering and negotiated an affordable transport cost. This means that we have to buy ingredients less frequently now.”

We anticipated that 2021 would be a year filled with starts, stops, and pivots. We are confident that our team of strong women can do this and use these experiences to our advantage to innovate and improve our processes.