Dangerous loaves (1)
BUTTER Roll bakery looms like an unfinished painting; vignette of a hub without a name.
Its filthiness strikes you at first sight. Hard noises hit you from the entrance, precursor to the factory’s baking rites.
The ghost-like quality of the bakery’s exterior on a Thursday evening, conflicts with its infinitely diverse yet monolithic work stations – inside, a handful of labourers share common tasks and soiled workspaces.
A network of cobwebs hang jarringly from the dusting ceiling. Beneath the roof, Festus Alabi aka Payen, a mixer, cuts a torrid sight. Shiny rivulets of sweat travel from his armpits, to drop through his sleeveless vest, into the mix of flour, yeast, water, sugar, salt and ‘improvers.’
On the factory floor, the production starts with Alabi, who dumps the mixed dough on the roller operator, two paces behind.
The operator, a middle aged man, feeds dough into a mechanised roller. Like his younger colleagues in the bakery, he is unclad and drippy with sweat. Occasionally, he pauses from his task to wipe the sweat off his face, thus splashing showers of perspiration on the ground and into the processed food. There are no gloves on his hands nor is he wearing an apron. Few minutes later, he lifts the dough, now a sticky mass, and moves from his workstation to dump it on a steel platform, used for traditional moulding and cutting of the processed meal.
Immediately, three young boys attack the giant gob of dough, with consummate speed and skill. Pounding on it with their bare fists, they flatten and roll it to contentment.
Amid the flurry, one of the trio pauses to rub the lower end of his back, scratching his finger deliriously across and within the upper part of the groove between his butt cheeks. Relieved, he resumes his task, dipping both hands into the sticky dough, flattening and rolling it with the same fingers he used to relieve his butt itch.
Watching from a distance, the master baker hastens his fellow labourers on their tasks; sidling across the factory floor with exaggerated grace, he monitors the workers’ organised ruckus.
Within the bakehouse’s choked architecture, teenagers toil with aging and more experienced labourers to turn one and a half bag of flour into freshly baked loaves.
The following day, a gaggle of women sit impatiently on worn out benches, like chickens roosting on an old fallen log. They discuss soaring bread prices and turf wars while they await the master baker’s call for the risen and freshly baked bread. At the latter’s signal, they leap from their benches and swarm around him, crowding the entrance.
A privileged few force their way into the bakery; having placed dibs on the bakeshop’s early batch of scented loaves, the master baker lets them have their pick from the first batch.
Gradually, the rabble of retailers begin to thin out, each retailer balancing their erstwhile empty trays, now filled with bread, on their heads as they march off to jostle and sell to consumers on the streets.
As they march off in brisk, purposeful steps, some of the retailers make a detour bringing out branded nylon packs to repackage and rebrand the loaves, in their business names or the identity of bosses they answer to. Some, however, wait till they get to their point of sale or makeshift stalls by the sidewalk.
The bakery stands as a crystalline mirror of several handfuls, dotting the expanse of Agege and Alimosho local councils, revealing all their convoluted facets, monumental incoherence and shimmering vitality.
Where dreams collide
Lagosians eat body fluid with their meal. In appropriate setting, staff of the bakery would be fully attired in uniforms and aprons ideal for their different tasks. But the situation is markedly different in the Lagos bakery.
“Who uniform epp (help). Abeg, do consumers complain to you that the bread tastes different because we do not wear uniforms? See, this is proper ‘Agege bread’ and its the same all over,” quipped Chiedu Akpan, the master baker.
“Everybody you see on this factory floor is here to hustle. Some of us work in two or three bakeries. The situation is the same everywhere. Nobody has time for uniforms…Even if we wear uniforms, we will take them off because of the heat in the bakery,” stressed Akpan.
Thomas Otun, 17, is just killing time in the bakery. “I am here to make a livelihood. I get paid N1, 000 for my daily labour and I go home with a loaf of bread,” he said.
Likewise Theresa Akinrogun, 43, works in the bakery to make ends meet. “From this place, I get money to feed my family. I get free loaves too,” said the single mother of four, adding that her N1, 000 earning is never enough to feed her famliy.
Dreams collide within the bakery’s dusty walls, dissolving the boundaries between mixer and roller, manager and master baker, packer and arranger.
Abiodun Shonde melds with the dust. A baker of “true worth.” Like a living time machine, he is driven to make ends meet despite series of bad spells that have seen him lose his wife and capital to bad sales.
“My wife left me because I ran into a bad spell. I couldn’t give her the life she felt she deserved. Before life turned awry for me, I gave everything she desired. At that time, we turned over as much as 10 bags of flour in a day and the customers kept coming for more. But suddenly, things went bad and we could barely produce one bag in a day. The highest we do currently, is to produce bread from one and a half bag of flour at peak period,” he said.
The 26-year-old has survived worse spells, he said, adding that he trusts business to improve soon, like a hopeful magnate banking on the history and possibilities of Nigeria’s bread segment, estimated at N122.1 billion (US$621 million), and representing 80 per cent of the
The 26-year-old has survived worse spells, he said, adding that he trusts business to improve soon, like a hopeful magnate banking on the history and possibilities of Nigeria’s bread segment, estimated at N122.1 billion (US$621 million), and representing 80 per cent of the baked goods sector.“My wife left me because I ran into a bad spell. I couldn’t give her the life she felt she deserved. Before life turned awry for me, I gave everything she desired. At that time, we turned over as much as 10 bags of flour in a day and the customers kept coming for more. But suddenly, things went bad and we could barely produce one bag in a day. The highest we do currently, is to produce bread from one and a half bag of flour at peak period,” he said.
According to him, inadequate capital, rising costs of production, stiff competition and unstable power supply are major impediments to business. Recent KPMG estimates reveal that the country’s bread segment has grown at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14 per cent over a five-year period, 2011 to 2016 to be precise. Annual production is estimated at 554,270 tonnes, with a CAGR of 3 per cent over the corresponding five-year period.
Growth in volumes till 2019 is forecast at a CAGR of three per cent. Bread production in the country, both artisanal and packaged, is dominated by local players. This is because players service target markets within specific localities, driven by the mass market demand for freshly produced bread.
In an ideal situation…
In a well equipped bakery, the sifted flour is poured into an industrial mixer. Temperature-controlled water is piped into the mixer. This mixture is called “gluten” and gives bread its elasticity. A pre- measured amount of yeast is added. Yeast is actually a tiny organism which feeds off the sugars in the grain, and emits carbon dioxide. The growth of the yeast produces gas bubbles, which leaven the bread. Depending on the type of bread to be made, other ingredients are also poured into the mixer. Modern mixers can process up to 2,000 pounds (908 kg) of dough per minute.
What The Nation discovered…
At Butter Roll bakery, however, the mixer is a long rectangular container built like a bathtub and placed against the wall but in an ideal bakery, it is essentially an enclosed drum that rotates at speeds between 35 to 75 revolutions per minute.
Inside the drum, mechanical arms knead the dough to the desired consistency in a matter of seconds. Although modern bread production is highly computerized, the ability of the mixing staff to judge the elasticity and appearance of the dough is critical.
Experienced personnel will be able to determine the consistency by the sound of the dough as it rolls around the mixer. The mixing process takes about 12 minutes.
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| •Baker mix dough in this long rectangular structure not minding the decayed and congealed grime stuck to its interior and exterior |
Fermentation – How it should be done…
In some plants, high-speed machinery is designed to manipulate the dough at extreme speeds and with great force, which forces the yeast cells to rapidly multiply. Fermentation can also be induced by the addition of chemical additives such as 1-cysteine (a naturally occurring amino acid) and vitamin C.
Some breads are allowed to ferment naturally. In this instance, the dough is placed in covered metal bowls and stored in a temperature-controlled room until it rises.
What The Nation discovered…
In bakeries visited by The Nation, bakers resort to the use of banned chemical additives like Pottasium Bromate, to make the bread rise faster. All of the bakeries visited by The Nation, for instance, used additives widely known as ‘improvers.’Although none of the bakeshop managers admitted to using Potassium Bromate, staff of the various bakeries admitted to its use, claiming it is needed to make the bread rise in record time.
Olumide Ibitola, master baker at a traditional oven in Agege, contended that every baker worth his salt uses the banned chemical to speed up the production process.
“We all use it. Even the very big bakeries use it. Forget their claims otherwise. It’s an unwritten but secret code of our operations. We need to use it as an improver, so that the loaves would rise faster and we would meet production demands. If we don’t use it, the quality of the bread will be bad and we will lose our customers to those who use it,” he said.
The moulding and baking process
In an ideal bakery, after the dough has fermented, it is loaded into a divider with rotating blades that cut the dough into pre-determined weights. A conveyer belt then moves the pieces of dough to a moulding machine. The moulding machine shapes the dough into balls and drops them onto a layered conveyor belt that is enclosed in a warm, humid cabinet called a “prover.” The dough moves slowly through the prover so that it may “rest,” and so that the gas reproduction may progress.
When the dough emerges from the prover, it is conveyed to a second molding machine, which re-shapes the dough into loaves and drops them into pans. The pans travel to another prover that is set at a high temperature and with a high level of humidity. Here, the dough regains the elasticity lost during fermentation and the resting period.
From the prover, the pans enter a tunnel oven. The temperature and speed are carefully calculated so that when the loaves emerge from the tunnel, they are completely baked and partially cooled. While inside the tunnel, the loaves are mechanically dumped from the pans onto shelves. The baking and cooling process lasts approximately 30 minutes.
What The Nation discovered…
Labourers mould the loaves with their bare hands, without using hand gloves as specified by the regulatory agency, the National Agency for Food, Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC). In all of the artisanal bakeries visited, the staff shaped the dough into balls, weighing each ball on a scale to determine its size and price range.
The butter fraud
The Nation findings revealed deceptive claims by bakers. Two out of five bakers claiming to produce buttered bread do otherwise. Contrary to claims by Butter Roll managers, for instance, bread loaves produced at the bakery are not made with butter. In apparent contradiction of its claim, the bakery does not melt and mix butter with the flour as required in making butter bread. Rather, staff of the bakeshop squeeze thin gobs of butter on a finger and smear it in the pan used to hold the dough for fermentation. Sometimes, they simply rub it thinly on chopped dough. The intent is to give the loaves the scent of buttered bread.
Consumers react
Waliu Abiodun, an artisan (steel fabricator), sees nothing wrong with the artisanal bakeries. “I have been eating bread produced from such bakeries since childhood. Look at me today, I am hale and hearty. I didn’t die. There is nothing wrong with their work. They are just trying to survive and we depend on bread produced by them,” he said. Corroborating him, Oyindamola, a single mother and resident of the street housing Butter Roll Bread, off Papa Ashafa, Agege, argued that she has been feeding her family with the bread since they moved to the area, “And nothing bad has happened to us. These people are just trying yo survive. We are all trying to survive,” she said.
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| •NAFDAC specifies that bakers wear gloves to mix dough but very few comply |
However, Afolake Adetela, a teacher and neighbour to one such bakery in Alakuko, dismissed claims that the loaves are harmless on consumption.
“It is very wrong for anyone to claim that the loaves produced are harmless. Several studies have shown that they aren’t…In fact, ever since I came by documented reports alerting the pubic to the harm in consuming such bread, I resolved to only patronise NAFDAC-approved bakeries in my area and every where I go.
“It’s worrisome that many of bakers add potassium bromate to their bread, not minding that it has been banned and declared harmful by NAFDAC. The conditions in which they produce are also very alarming. I have been opportune to witness it and ever since, I vowed not to patronise such bakeries. Yes, ‘Agege bread’ has been romanticised by all over time. But it is dangerous to health,” she said.
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| •A bake house personnel sits carelessly exposing his butt on the slab where bread ismoulded and cut for the oven |
NAFDAC requirements for bread manufacturing facility
Recently, the National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) shut down 24 bakeries in Maiduguri metropolis of Borno State for illegal operations and unhygienic baking practices.
The coordinator of the agency, Nasiru Mato, disclosed that the bakeries were operating without licences and non-adherence to guidelines and standards of baking. He said the affected bakeries had been operating in the metropolis without licences and minimum standards of operations.
“We embarked on a comprehensive campaign to ensure that the 300 bakeries comply with our guidelines to check sale and distribution of unwholesome products. This is to protect public health. Some of the bakeries are not registered by NAFDAC, while others operate with fake label, product name and addresses,” he said.
The agency will do well to beam its searchlight across artisanal bakeries dotting the country’s expanse.
The food and drugs regulatory agency, in its guidelines for inspection and
requirements for bread manufacturing, published by its Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (FSAN) Directorate requires baking personnel to wear protective apparel such as overall, head cover, nose and mouth masks and hand gloves to protect products from contamination.
The agency also requires bakery personnel to have access to medical treatment and checks for communicable diseases at least twice a year and the records should be kept within the facility.
There should be adequate training for employees in the particular operations that they perform. NAFDAC also requires that buildings used in manufacturing, processing and packaging of bread should be adequately located, constructed and of suitable dimensions to facilitate cleaning and maintenance.
“The building should have adequate space for the orderly placement of equipment and materials to prevent cross-contamination,” stressed NAFDAC, adding that bread packaging should state very clearly, the address, ingredients and NAFDAC-approval number of the product.
The specified requirements are flagrantly flouted by Butter Roll bakery, among others.
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