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| BUSY: The workers in the factory filling and sorting out the ready ice ice cream. |
Kampala, Uganda – Most of us love ice cream. Right from the time when we were little and into adulthood, this is a delicacy that remains special to our taste buds. In Uganda, the pioneer maker of various ice cream products is Fidodido Industries.
Ice cream is a yummy. It is made from dairy products plus additives like sugar, flavous, food colour and is best enjoyed during lazy hours of leisure but when the weather can really get hot.
While most of us, especially the girls enjoy eating the creamy frozen stuff, few of us have any idea what it takes to turn milk into the chilling cream that we so much love to lick and eat.
In an interview, Vianney Mukasa, the Quality Controller at Fidodido, said ice cream and yoghurt, (the other product produced at their industrial area based factory), is made from local milk collected by dealers from different parts of the Uganda.
He said the starting point is collecting milk from cooler trucks, from which a representative sample is taken to the labs. This is to see if the milk being supplied meets the standards of the factory.
When this is checked to be affirmative, the milk is then poured into storage tanks from where it is taken to be boiled, in addition to some basic ingredients.
Mukasa said milk is preheated to 45 degrees Celsius then more ingredients are added, before it is boiled to 90 degrees when milk for yoghurt and 85% for milk intended for ice cream is ready. This boiling process is called pasteurization.
Fidodido has to confirm to the required standards as set by the Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS). This involves a vigorous laboratory analysis to make sure customers get healthy and safe products on the market.
After the boiling, Mukasa said, the hot milk is filtered to take away physical hazards (dirt) or anything that can be trapped like animal hairs and sand among others things
Once the milk is clean and safe it is harmonized or standardized to distribute fats, sugar and stabilizers before it is cooled.
“For yoghurt, we cool it to inoculation temperature of 43 degrees, while milk intended for ice cream, it’s cooled to ageing temperatures of 4 degrees. For yoghurt, after cooling we put it into incubation tanks for four to six hours for yoghurt to ferment. For ice cream, the ice cream mix is put in the ageing tank to mature or nucleation,” Mukasa said.
After six hours, flavours like strawberry and vanilla are added to yoghurt before it’s packed for refrigeration (at 4 degrees) and then dispatched to the market.
When ice cream has matured, the mix is pumped into the flavoring tanks to add flavours like vanilla, pista, chocolate, strawberry mango, orange and pineapple from where it then packaged in different container sizes.
“After flavouring, we run it through a continuous batch ice cream freezing machine. That’s when it becomes the ice cream you buy, package it in cups, tabs and store it in a cold room of negative eight degrees and below, ready for dispatch to the market,” Mukasa said.
Fidodido supplies their products across the country, but especially supermarkets, schools, and other major retail centres.
Raj Pabari, a Director at Fidodido, told East African Business Week, they are targeting exporting to the rest of the East Africa next year.
Having started out in 1993 as an ice cream parlour, Fidodido has grown to become an award winning processor and distributor of dairy products in Uganda.
The company is at the heart of ice cream business, to the extent that when you mention ice cream, the name Fidodido comes to mind first. It is now a household name in Uganda.
Their retail shop on Kampala Road, central Kampala, is still a popular hang-out even after all these years as new generations take to enjoying products.
Recently, Fidodido was given two awards by the Dairy Development Authority (DDA) for a job well done in selling making and selling quality products.
Fidodido won a platinum award and a gold award for emerging the best ice cream processor and yoghurt processor respectively at an event where the DDA recognized the achievements of Uganda’s dairy industry.
The company, in previous years, has also won a number of awards in recognition of providing healthy and nutritious products to their consumers.
Just like they have excelled at producing good products, Fidodido, has been a strong supporter of local farmers who supply the factory with raw milk.
Fidodido Industries employs 40 people directly and hundreds indirectly through the network of farmers and middle men whose lives have improved because of their ties with the ice cream maker.
Pabari said 20 years ago when they were starting, they used to consume 500 litres of milk but today they are buying over 25,000 litres delivered to them by middle men from western Uganda.
In 2006, they set up the factory which expanded their product profile to steadily become the first ice cream company to be certified by UNBS, who awarded them the Standard Mark.
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