Processing
Benin-based food company, Fenou Foods, has invented Wassa-Wassa Tchigan – a tasty, nutritious, pre-cooked, dried yam couscous that has slashed preparation time from half a day to just 15 minutes.
Maxime Hountondji and Sonita Tossou – the brains behind Wassa-Wassa Tchigan (deluxe) – sold their first bag of pre-cooked, dried yam couscous in March 2016. Yam, in various forms, accounts for more than 25% of household food intake in Benin, helping this revolutionary new concept quickly become an agribusiness success story. “Wassa-Wassa Tchigan is a quick-cook product that’s easy to store and transport,” explain Hountondji and Tossou.
Anyone who has cooked wassa-wassa, using traditional time-consuming methods, understands why this new concept is so ground-breaking. “The traditional wassa-wassa recipe is a labour of love,” explains Dina Monra, who owns a small restaurant in Parakou, 415 km north of Cotonou. “It takes half a day to make, and you can’t take your eye off it for a second or the grains will stick together.” Fenou Foods decided to tackle the preparation time issue head-on, with a new pre-cooking process in which the product is steamed then oven-dried. The firm’s workforce of around a dozen staff produce fully separated wassa-wassa grains, which take just 15 minutes to prepare at home.
Wassa-Wassa Tchigan, which comes in 200 g semi-transparent bags, is so quick to cook and easy to store and transport that the young entrepreneurs have rapidly cornered the market in Benin. After just 1 year in business, the company’s product is now stocked in around a dozen supermarkets in the capital, Porto Novo, and exported to neighbouring countries, retailing for 1,500 CFA francs (around €2) per bag. Spurred by ever-growing demand, Fenou Foods increased output from 150 bags a month in 2016 to its current production of more than 3,000 bags a month.
Wassa-Wassa Tchigan offers no nutritional benefits over the traditional recipe, but Azarath Ogbon, the firm’s nutrition expert and production director, stresses that the product “meets food safety and hygiene standards” established by Benin’s national food regulation agency. In April 2017, the product even won second prize for quality in the NGO Act for Development’s awards at the Benin agribusiness expo – recognition that has gone down well with consumers, who no longer have to spend hours in the kitchen to make one of their favourite dishes. “My husband and children love it, but it’s something I could only prepare on the occasional weekend,” says Audrey Dossoukpè, mother of two daughters aged 7 and 12. “Now, I can make it whenever they want, and it doesn’t require much effort. It’s incredible – I can do in 15 minutes what used to take me five hours. It’s been an absolute godsend!”
As well as producing Wassa-Wassa Tchigan, Fenou Foods also sells Telibd'or (yam flour) and ground spices.
Claude Biao
