Century Green & The Melach Group
Building a sustainable environment for food production, research,
and growth towards a better future!
As the sole Partner of Melach Group of Companies, Ltd in North America, Century Green is the exclusive marketing representative for Melach Coconut Processing Farm and its products in all countries of North America.
CENTURY GREEN CONSORTIUM, LLC
Our Story
Century Green Consortium is a Georgia corporation established for agribusiness with interests in Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. Century Green began as the agriculture industry services unit of AIM Partners PLC, providing professional consulting services to Agribusiness and Argo-Processing Enterprises in the USA and the ECOWAS region of Africa. This practice familiarized our principals with the constraints faced by African farmers and ago-processors in terms of poor primary infrastructure – electricity, roads, irrigation – and limited access to capital and modern technologies to scale their operations.
In 2016, our company was invited by the Mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, to invest in the conversion of a closed-down shopping mall located in a ‘Food Desert’ into an indoor aquaculture/aquaponics facility. Our Century Green Team began to appreciate how modern farming and value addition technologies can contribute effectively to food security in developing nations in Africa and elsewhere, where climate disasters have been known to wreak havoc on any given population. Hence, Century Green Consortium, comprised of agribusiness entrepreneurs and corporations, was incorporated in 2021 to become a veritable partner in the UN Sustainable Development Goal 2: end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
Primary Focus
Our primary focus is Africa, and under a SaaS Agreement, we developed a Fintech Platform that is well suited for onboarding our farming, trading, and agro-processing communities and any business groups anywhere that seek access to capital and insurance for business and better life outcomes. Built on 4 Pillars, our agricultural enterprise aims to address food security issues while ensuring good return on investment, environmental sustainability, and social and corporate governance measures.
One of the 4 Pillars of our business enterprise – The Fintech Platform – is a robust financial inclusion technology for the unbanked and underbanked anywhere, especially in Africa, where, according to World Bank data, four hundred million of the adult African population are unbanked. With our financial technology partners, we are geared to address these issues head-on. We work to provide access to financial services for informal, unbanked, and underbanked sectors across Africa and promote economic and financial inclusion.
The Century Green-Jamborow Fintech Platform connects financial institutions, insurance companies, farmers, and producers to promote financial inclusion, value addition, training/ education, and food security. The Platform capabilities include intelligent data acquisition and the ability to model and predict user activities on the Platform and in real-life scenarios. The Platform currently has a presence in 7 African Markets – Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Botswana, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, with 1.3 million onboarded. Strategic Partnerships include commercial banks, insurance companies, pension providers, payments processors & settlements, Logistics companies, lending companies, HNWIs, NGOs, BNPL, Retail, etc.
Powering our agriculture and ago-processing ventures with Ag and financial technologies, we can better manage and scale the capabilities and life outcomes of our Out grower and Smallholder Farmer communities, over 60% of whom are women and youth. Our contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is synonymous with how we create employment, pay fair produce prices and wages directly to farmers, provide education and technical support for sustainable farming and agribusiness practices, and how we create credit footprint and access to capital for clients, resulting in more consistent and increasing quantity and quality of products.
To learn more, visit us at:
About the Melach Group
How We Made it in Africa
When a rabbi boarded a plane from Israel to Ghana in 2016, it was a journey that would change the fortunes of an entrepreneur who had set his sights on creating a coconut products company. At the time, Michael Annan-Forson, CEO of Melach Coconut Processing Farm, had advertised coconut oil that was made in his kitchen on the networking site LinkedIn.
A businessman in Jerusalem reached out to the Ghanian entrepreneur, requesting a sample. Impressed with the quality of the oil, he asked Annan-Forson if he could manufacture six tons and send it to Israel.
The entrepreneur, who had only made coconut oil on a small scale, accepted the order and set about figuring out how to ramp up production. He was paid USD 35,000 up front by the Israeli businessman to fast-track the process.
“The man sent me the whole amount without even knowing if I was authentic or not. I had to pack up everything in my flat in Accra and move to Kumasi in the Ashanti region where I was able to rent a factory space and purchase a small grinding machine,” says Annan-Forson.
He was able to complete the order in only seven days, processing the coconuts quicker than expected. The rabbi was sent to Kumasi to certify if the oil met the kosher standards of the Jewish religion.
Source – https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/ghana-the-story-of-a-coconut-company-that-exports-throughout-the-world/136554/
Continued Growth
Since Melach’s first sale, the company has expanded to become one of Africa’s foremost exporters of coconut products, including oil, water, porridge, charcoal, potash and sugar. Annan-Forson sources the raw material from 166 smallholder farmers in the Nzema region of western Ghana and 200 acres of company-owned land, where the coconuts are farmed on an industrial scale, to ensure that there is never a disruption to supply.
The CEO was able to buy another processing machine after he secured a $17,000 grant from the Department for International Development (DFID), the UK’s former development agency. However, aside from the grant and the upfront capital from Israel, the company has never taken out a loan.
Source – https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/ghana-the-story-of-a-coconut-company-that-exports-throughout-the-world/136554/
Melach Expansion
“We have never had a facility from any bank. When we started in 2006, I was going from bank to bank with my proposal and they were throwing me away because they did not believe in the project. Today almost every bank is knocking on our door to give us a loan,” Annan-Forson says.
Melach has since expanded its exports to clients in Thailand, the Netherlands, Bangladesh and Mexico. “We are also supplying to the USA, it is one of our biggest customers. We supply Costco with a minimum of 50 tonnes a month,” he says.
The business model is to sell coconut products, like oil and water, in bulk to companies that process the raw material and create a branded product for consumers.
Source – https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/ghana-the-story-of-a-coconut-company-that-exports-throughout-the-world/136554/
Competing Globally
Annan-Forson says the company has managed to outcompete rivals in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia – big coconut producing countries. The strategy, he says, is selling coconut products at a lower price.
“If one litre of certified oil is about USD 4.9 we try our best to do production in a way where we can sell below that, at USD 3, for example.”
The Ghanaian national previously worked in Thailand for six years as an HR manager for a big coconut company where he got the idea for his business. Some of the large Thai companies have now started buying from Melach rather than processing coconuts themselves as they can still maintain a profit margin after buying the oil at a reduced price from the Ghanian company, Annan-Forson says.
The company’s balance sheet reflects the firm’s growth as a global exporter. Melach is now able to produce around 600 tonnes a year of coconut produce and it registered a profit of USD 966,000 in 2021.
The CEO says that sales were boosted during the pandemic by the continued demand from cosmetic companies that use coconut oil for beauty products. He expects sales to increase by 40% each year and aims to reach USD 2 million profit in 2022.
Source – https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/ghana-the-story-of-a-coconut-company-that-exports-throughout-the-world/136554/
Targeting Africa
However, alongside continued exports outside Africa, Melach is also now targeting the rest of the continent.
“We want to look back to the nation and do something for the nation. We want to take advantage of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). We see opportunity in West Africa and other parts,” he says.
The CEO recently returned from Kenya where he is setting up a processing facility in Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean, to supply eastern and southern Africa. In addition, he is also looking to expand into soya beans and has invested over USD 300,000 in a plant near Ghana’s coastline to start producing edible oil from the commodity.
Source – https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/ghana-the-story-of-a-coconut-company-that-exports-throughout-the-world/136554/