Mira Mehta spent years on tomato yields before she built a factory in Kaduna. Her company now targets more than a threefold rise in fresh tomato production by 2029.

Mira Mehta runs a tomato processing business in Kaduna, and she built the farm before the factory. An adviser named Chris told her not to dream about a factory, she says, until you can get the yields up. Without competitive yields, he warned, imports from China or efficient American producers would crush her.

She had moved to Nigeria in the late 2000s and noticed that nearly every can of paste sold under a Nigerian brand name was made and packed in China. In a glut, she says, the basket the farmers used was worth more than the tomatoes inside it. She decided to pursue the idea full time in 2014. That year she took it to Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition and won the Social Enterprise Track runner-up prize.

Prosper Africa helped her raise the factory’s money, she said in 2022. Her first paste came off the line in March 2021, by her account. Nigeria was importing an average of 150,000 tonnes of tomato paste concentrate a year, worth about $170 million, according to a 2022 report.

At the port, she told BusinessDay, she paid about 5 per cent duty on Italian processing equipment that should have come in duty free. Imported retail-packed paste has been on Nigeria’s prohibited list since a 2019 Finance Ministry circular, and it appears again on a schedule dated 1 April 2026. Daily Trust reported that the ban does not cover concentrate imported in drums for local brands to repack.

On the farm, she told Daily Trust that insecurity makes movement around the site difficult. She has also said she no longer runs a traditional out-grower system, because those farmers could not get enough water onto their plants at a workable cost. More than half of the company’s raw materials now come from smallholders in Kaduna State.

At the end of September the company announced a US$2.5 million convertible note from EDFI Management Company, through the EU-funded AgriFI. The money is for packaging equipment, factory upgrades and drip irrigation. In May, Sabou Capital provided a $2 million naira-denominated facility.

The company expects annual fresh tomato output to rise from just over 4,500 tonnes to about 16,000 tonnes by 2029. It expects the smallholders it works with to rise from about 500 to 1,500. EDFI expects the note to help catalyse a US$6 million equity round in 2028.

Every person she consulted told her the hard part of the business was the farming, she has said. She is still holding the order she was given at the start. The farm comes first and the factory second.