Ivette Biokou Is Turning Benin’s Fruit Surplus Into Opportunity
Ivette Biokou is turning surplus fruit into sustainable business.
Every harvest brings a window of opportunity.
For farmers growing mangoes, bananas and pineapples in Benin, that window can also be a race against time. Fresh fruit is highly perishable, and when it cannot be sold, stored or processed quickly enough, its value can disappear.
For Ivette Biokou, that loss presented a business opportunity.
Instead of allowing surplus fruit to become waste, she began transforming it into products with a longer shelf life and new commercial possibilities.
Through Ewatomi Market, founded in Parakou, Ivette is processing locally grown fruits into dried snacks and fruit-based products while building a business around sustainability, employment and local agricultural value.
Her approach is simple but consequential: if fresh produce cannot always reach the market in time, the market can find another way to preserve its value.
Ivette Biokou saw opportunity in what others might discard
Benin has a strong agricultural base and produces a variety of tropical fruits.
But producing food is only one part of building a resilient food system.
Farmers also need ways to preserve, process, distribute and sell their harvests. Without those systems, seasonal abundance can become a liability. When supply temporarily exceeds demand or processing capacity, fresh produce can spoil before it generates income.
It was this challenge that caught Ivette Biokou’s attention in Parakou.
She saw that fruit that might otherwise be lost could be transformed into products that remain useful and marketable for longer.
That insight became the foundation of Ewatomi Market.
The business was designed not simply as a food-processing venture, but as a way to create more value from agricultural produce while responding to the environmental and economic costs associated with food waste.
What does Ewatomi Market do?
Ewatomi Market is a Beninese food-processing business that transforms locally grown fruits into value-added products.
Its product range includes dried fruit snacks as well as pineapple and mango fruit liqueurs, giving the company multiple ways to turn locally available produce into products for different consumer markets.
The business supplies products to restaurants, hotels and student communities in Parakou, connecting locally processed food with everyday consumers.
The model has an important advantage.
Instead of relying entirely on the short commercial life of fresh fruit, processing creates products that can remain available for longer and reach customers through different channels.
For farmers and agricultural communities, this creates another potential route to market.
For consumers, it creates access to locally processed fruit products.
And for the business itself, it creates an opportunity to build a brand around an abundant local resource.
From a one-person operation to a growing food business
The scale of Ewatomi Market today is difficult to understand without looking at where it started.
Before participating in the Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme, Ivette operated the business alone with basic equipment.
Monthly revenue stood at approximately US$300.
Limited storage and rudimentary processing methods constrained both production capacity and product consistency, making it difficult to respond to increasing demand.
The challenge was therefore not simply finding more customers.
Ivette needed the capacity to serve them.
That meant investing in better equipment, improving production processes and developing the business systems needed to move from small-scale production towards a more structured enterprise.
The transformation has been significant.
Ewatomi Market’s monthly revenue increased from US$300 to US$4,821, while the business expanded from a one-person operation to a team of five employees.
The growth represents more than a fifteen-fold increase in monthly revenue.
It also illustrates how improving production capacity can change the possibilities available to a small agricultural business.
The Tony Elumelu Foundation helped Ivette Biokou build capacity
In 2024, Ivette Biokou joined the Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme, receiving US$5,000 in seed capital, alongside business training, mentorship and access to the Foundation’s pan-African entrepreneurial network.
For Ewatomi Market, the capital addressed one of its most immediate constraints: equipment.
Ivette invested in industrial-grade drying and storage equipment, strengthening the company’s production capacity and helping improve consistency across its products.
The business training provided another layer of support.
Ivette developed her knowledge of financial management, business planning and operational growth, while mentorship provided guidance around food safety and market positioning.
The combination was important.
Equipment could increase what the business was capable of producing. Business knowledge could help determine how that increased capacity should be managed.
Together, they helped create the conditions for Ewatomi Market’s next stage of growth.
Why processing matters as much as production
Agricultural development is often measured by how much a farmer can produce.
But there is another question worth asking:
How much of that production becomes economic value?
A kilogram of fresh mango that spoils before reaching a customer creates little or no income.
The same fruit, when processed into a product with a longer shelf life, can potentially reach a different market, at a different time and in a different form.
This is the economic logic behind Ewatomi Market.
By processing fruits locally, Ivette Biokou is adding another layer of value between farm and consumer.
That creates opportunities for activity beyond agriculture itself, including processing, packaging, sales, distribution and employment.
It also demonstrates why agro-processing can be an important part of strengthening local food systems.
The goal is not simply to produce more.
It is to lose less and create more value from what is already produced.
Ivette Biokou is building a business with women at its centre
For Ivette, the impact of entrepreneurship does not stop with her own company.
The expansion of Ewatomi Market has created employment opportunities for women and young people, but she also wants to extend the business’s knowledge beyond its immediate workforce.
Her plans include developing training programmes that teach young women practical food-processing skills alongside the fundamentals of entrepreneurship.
That combination matters.
Technical skills can create the ability to produce a product. Business skills can provide the knowledge required to price, market and manage it.
Together, they can create a stronger foundation for people seeking to build their own livelihoods.
For Ivette Biokou, sharing those skills is part of the wider opportunity embedded in Ewatomi Market: turning local resources into businesses while helping more people develop the capacity to create businesses of their own.
From food waste to economic value
There is a tendency to discuss food waste primarily as an environmental problem.
It is one, but it is also an economic problem.
When food is lost, farmers lose potential income, businesses lose potential revenue and the resources used to produce that food generate less value.
Food processing offers one way of changing that equation.
By converting perishable agricultural products into products with different shelf-life and market characteristics, entrepreneurs can create additional opportunities within the food value chain.
That is the space Ewatomi Market occupies.
The company is still growing, but its trajectory illustrates what can happen when an entrepreneur treats a seemingly familiar agricultural challenge as a product and business opportunity.
Looking ahead
Ivette Biokou wants Ewatomi Market to become one of Benin’s leading sustainable food brands.
The immediate ambition is to expand distribution across Benin before exploring opportunities in neighbouring West African markets.
The company also plans to invest in eco-friendly packaging, digital marketing and distribution partnerships, with the aim of reaching more consumers and strengthening the brand’s market presence.
That expansion will require more than production.
It will require reliable supply chains, consistent quality, strong branding, efficient distribution and the ability to compete across increasingly sophisticated consumer markets.
But Ewatomi Market has already demonstrated the value of building capacity around a clear problem.
Ivette Biokou is not simply preserving fruit. She is preserving the economic value inside it.
By turning Benin’s seasonal abundance into products that can travel further, last longer and reach new customers, she is building a business that connects sustainability with commercial opportunity.
And her journey points to a wider possibility for African agriculture: the next opportunity may not always be found in growing more—it may be found in making more of what is already grown.