Kasapreko: Herbal Bitters on Tour

The fastest PET bottling line for liquor that Krones has ever installed is up and running – in the West African nation of Ghana. The privately owned enterprise Kasapreko commissioned it in December 2012. Two lines, to be precise: a returnable-glass line rated at 30,000 bottles an hour, and a PET line rated at 40,000 containers an hour. The line is mainly used to bottle a herbal bitters, said to have an aphrodisiacal effect. Kasapreko is hard put to it to meet the demand for this African digestive bitters.

Almost every day, in the courtyard of Kasapreko’s facility in Ghana’s capital of Accra, stands a heavy goods truck from Nigeria with an open, overlength trailer. Early in the morning, three men begin to load the truck, carton by carton, each packed with 24 0.20-litre flat PET containers, filled with the herbal Alomo Bitters, with each carton weighing 5.2 kilograms. By the afternoon, the trailer is full, with the stack reaching a good metre above the side walls. The workers will have loaded precisely 10,000 cartons, for a load weighing 52 tons. The truck then begins its journey – to Nigeria, to Lagos 500 kilometres away. The vehicle will be on the road for almost four days, always along the coast, because it has to cross three frontiers: first to Togo, then to Benin, and finally Nigeria.

Nigeria is meanwhile the second-biggest market for Kasapreko, with almost 40 per cent of its sales finding their way over the borders. This, too, is why Kasapreko is planning to build a production facility of its own in Nigeria. But for the time being the herbal bitters continue to trundle over the trans-African highways.

Good things needn’t be expensive

Dr. Kwabena Adjei was supporting himself and his family as a small-scale trader when towards the end of the 1980s the time of revolutions in Ghana was finally over and business life slowly began to normalise. There was already, of course, a whole series of spirits producers. But almost everyone was buying the flavourings from the same supplier, with the result that everything somehow tasted more or less identical. Dr. Adjei’s idea was to offer the country a little more diversity. He found a producer whose gin flavour accentuated the taste of juniper rather more vividly. In his garage in Accra’s suburb of Nungua, he teamed up with four employees to launch a small-scale bottling operation. In his ancient Volvo, he drove from bar to bar, and offered the proprietors his “Kasapreko Dry Gin” on a commission basis.

This triggered a boom in demand. Up till then, the Ghanaians’ high expectations for taste, quality, safety and attractive packaging had had to be met with costly imported goods. “Good quality doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive”, to quote Dr. Kwabena Adjei. Kasapreko was the first local producer to put in place a modern-day form of quality control and a product development lab, and to introduce an individualised bottle. With this philosophy, he discovered the proverbial market niche. Today, Kasapreko Dry Gin is the market leader in Ghana’s gin segment: “A product doesn’t have to be bad if it’s being offered at an affordable price”, was his reciprocal deduction. Success has proved him right.

“My romantic interest”

With this vision, he kept on searching for new products. Traditionally, the Ghanaians marinate fresh herbs and spices in alcohol for extraction, and use this form of bitters as a home-made medicine to cure stomach problems or fever. Many small private producers also swear that their secret recipes have an aphrodisiacal effect. Dr. Adjei gave considerable thought as to how this secret could be industrially packaged in bottles. He consulted the leading research centre in Africa which specialises in tropical medicine and had a recipe developed for a new kind of herbal spirit. He certified and standardised it, and gave it the name of “Alomo”, a word from the widely used Ghanaian dialect Twi, which means roughly “my romantic interest” or simply “desire”. The word “Kasapreko” also comes from the Twi language: it’s the form of address for a tribal chief, and can be translated as “speaking with authority” or “getting straight to the point”. The eponymous chief, by the way, sits on Kasapreko’s supervisory board.

A great success

At the beginning, Dr. Adjei was still using all sorts of different bottles, and even used cartons from other producers, which he turned inside out so as to conceal the printing. Professional-style bottling began in 1997. Alomo Bitters was thus the first Ghanaian herbal bitters to be produced on an industrial scale, and proved to be a great success. Kasapreko sold five million cartons in 2012, 70 per cent of which were Alomo Bitters with 43 per cent abv, using a 96-per-cent base alcohol from Brazil.

“The aphrodisiacal effect, by the way, is not just psychological, but actually does work”, emphasises Dr. Kwabena Adjei. “Until 2010, we had been advertising the product with the slogan ‘It’s a great tonic especially for men’. But since then we’ve stopped making this sort of claim on the label and in our advertising.” Success bred emulators: today, there are more than 200 relatively small herbal bitters producers in Ghana. But Kasapreko remains the front-runner on the spirits market, with a share of almost 50 per cent, four times as much as the next-biggest producer. “By 2013, we aim to have doubled the output to ten million cartons”, says a confident Dr. Kwabena Adjei.

The world’s fastest Krones line for spirits

In order to reach this target, Kasapreko commissioned two new Krones lines in December 2012. The company first had a new cantilever hall built, measuring 100 times 44 metres. Here, Krones has installed a returnable-glass line rated at 30,000 bottles an hour, and a non-returnable PET line for 40,000 containers per hour – the fastest spirits line Krones has ever installed anywhere in the world.

Hitherto, the bottling operation featured a relatively small glass line rated at 8,000 bottles an hour, a Chinese PET line dating from 2004 for 12,000 bottles an hour, a pre-owned 10,000-bph PET line, plus an English line installed in 2011 as an interim measure in rapid response to rising demand and rated at around 9,000 round bottles an hour. “For all these lines, it wasn’t always easy to plan the spares and the service, which was a bit of a handicap”, comments Dr. Kwabena Adjei. Kasapreko had been planning a major expansion thrust ever since 2007, because it was at this time that exports to Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, Liberia and Sierra Leone began to take off. Continue reading…