I don't know why Bloomberg didn't see this while designing the plant for Dangote. I did a similar design in 2015 and this was my finding: taking a production capacity of 360,000 tons of tomato paste annually as a basis. Material balance revealed that 2,477,100 tons of raw tomato is required. (Raw tomato is 7 degree Brix while tomato paste is 30 degree Brix). Market survey revealed that a ton of raw tomato in the local market was 350 dollars while a ton of tomato paste was 1,300 dollars. Ignoring every other costs, annual cost of raw material for the plant was 866,974,500 dollars whereas annual income from sales of tomato paste was 702,000,000 dollars. I concluded and reported that the plant was technically sound but lacked economic viability. My recommendations were: 1. Government should intervene and subsidize the production cost of tomato for farmers who would sell the raw material to processors at subsidized rate. 2. The plant should consider producing other products like lycopene from the waste. 3. The plant should employ pinch technology to recover heat from the three effect evaporator for use in other units like sterilization and preheating.

That is a brilliant perspective coming from you sir.
I've been following your posts on nairaland, you sound like one professor that thought me while I was still in school.
I enjoy reading your posts.

Maybachmeeky:
That is a brilliant perspective coming from you sir.
I've been following your posts on nairaland, you sound like one professor that thought me while I was still in school.
I enjoy reading your posts.

lolz ... thanks