Our visit to Zamsugar a.k.a. Zambia Sugar, Whitespoon brandname, Nakambala Factory

At the beginning of the month we had the opportunity to travel south with Martin again. He and his wife Elsa live next door to us. He is the Dutch Reform church minister and he travels to Livingstone once a month to meet with a congregation there. He has graciously offered for us to travel with him when he goes and we spend the first night in Mazabuka visiting with some of his parishioners (and now our new friends!) Hans and Daisy. The following morning he drops us off at Kalomo so we can spend a weekend with friends at Namwianga. We did this last month too and both visits have been such a wonderful blessing to us and just filled our souls up!

Traveling south on the tarmac from Lusaka.

Kafue flats.

 Hans works for Zambia Sugar and they live in the employee village on the plantation. On our last visit we expressed interest in a tour and Hans kindly arranged it for us. It was so interesting – but also extremely hot. I seriously thought I might pass out. Most of the machines are steam driven so as if the heat of the day, the multiple huge machines, and climbing lots of steam stairs wasn’t enough heat generation – there were also occasional bursts of steam! Wowzers. The tour was about 2.5 hours and our guide was excellent – he was a Chemist. We saw the whole process: cane growing in fields, arriving by truck to the factory, mulching the cane, several rounds through diffusion tanks using water to extract sugar from the cane, heating and evaporation, separation of juice and mud, crystal formation, drying of sugar, packaging, stacking, and storing ready for shipment. It was so interesting! 

Following are excerpts from the Matthew’s journal that he emails to family and friends while we are here combined with pictures. Hope this portrays a little of what we experienced that day!

--> Nakambala sugar plantation has been operating for a few decades now and employees 6000 employees during the harvest season. They cease production from December through April as this is the wet season here. Instead of producing sugar, they use these months for annual maintenance and thus their employee numbers decrease significantly. Our tour was led by a chemist who has worked there for 20 years and could we ever tell. He was extremely knowledgeable, sometimes to the point of information overload. 

We began by watching the semis drive in and have a sample taken so the independent farmers could be paid according to the quality of their cane sugar.

To determine the amount to pay farmers, each truck must pull through here, then that big arm at the top takes a cross section sample in 3 places. The sample is them mulched and sent to the lab to determine how much sugar is in this cane or the quality of the cane. Then price is set accordingly. This factory grows a lot of its own cane but it also purchases from 15 commercial farmers - of that total, 1 farm is a cooperative formed by medium-scale farmers.

Taking the sample.

The mulch to go to the lab.

 After this we watched as a crane offloaded the canes into a massive shredder which broke the canes into a mulch type consistency. After this the “mulch” travelled up a conveyor belt to a series of other tanks some of which used water to diffuse the sugar from the more solid particles. Flocculent was used once the sugar was in more liquid form to help settle the larger particles to the bottom and then the sugar water was filtered off to be sent to huge dryer machines where the sugar crystals grew in size. As you can likely tell, this is a large process most of which I am still unclear on. What was clear to me was that I felt like an Umpalumpa in Willy Wonka’s factory with bells and whistles ringing off and steam rising from various moving mechanical parts.  It was a great tour but I was conscious the entire time of the act that I couldn’t be sure how well maintained everything was or if we would survive the intense heat. 

 

Cane dumping from trucks into the shredder.

 

Mulch going from the shredder to the diffuser.

Yikes!

Mulch going into diffusers. It goes through 6 rounds of this to get the most amount of sugar out.

During the tour I was amazed by the scale of the operation but also by the working conditions of the warehouse. Things are done differently in Africa, this is true but the heat in some of the rooms people had to work in was unbearable. There was no air conditioning and all of the employees had to wear coveralls. I can’t be sure but I do know that if I had to wear those in that work environment, I would not be wearing another stitch of clothing. The entire process from sugar cane to the point of having sugar used for baking, etc. takes only 4 hours but with the drying time added to that the process takes around 12-14 hours. Pretty amazing really!

This is the nice brown sugar that we sell at home but they don't actually sell it here, rather it gets reprocessed to grow more crystals that makes white sugar.

After spinning the damp sugar crystals through a machine that uses centrifugal force to separate crystals from liquid, the crystals are sent to drying machines for about 10 hours.

The warehouses were probably what interested me most. We saw paper and poly bags being filled anywhere from 2 kg to 1 ton. As you can imagine Coca Cola and Pepsi as large customers for the factory and they are very particular in the quality of sugar they will accept. We saw how individual table size packets are filled as well as how they fill and seal the larger packets. In the warehouses for export we saw 20 young men acting as a human ladder moving 50kg bags to the top of the 60 foot tall pyramid of sugar. I was in awe and disgust at all of the sugar produced. I think we both swore off ever drinking another Coke. The rail system is used as well as semis for shipping the sugar.

These are the packages we see in grocery stores and most roadside tuckshops!

Here are the large bags being filled. Different coloured bags indicate the  destination - i.e. domestic or export. I think these are domestic use.

See the spool of thread? After is is filled is is sewed shut!

This 'Maple Syrup' tastes nothing like maple syrup from Canada - but it is much cheaper!

I was stoked to see this machine - I've always wondered how little tiny restaurant sugar packets are filled! Now I know. ;)

Human conveyor belt - 50kgs, 2-by-2, up and up and up.

These are for export to large industry. This sugar is literally loaded by front end loader off the warehouse floor...

There was at least 12 warehouses loaded from floor to ceiling with mountains of sugar and about 8 warehouse sized mountains outside covered in tarps waiting to be shipped. We were stunned. And our guid said that these piles don't stay for long - the mountains are quickly replaced though so one might think they are always there, but they piles are continually being shipped out and then piled high again with new bags of sugar daily.

An interesting thing about this factory is that they use burn the left over fiber from the cane to drive a turbine to create electricity. They have 2 smaller and one bigger turbine. (I think.) The bigger one is broken now, so there is more fiber than can be burned daily - so this mountain has grown. It is a fire hazard so they have started trucking it out to put on fields. 

Burning the fiber to create electricity. Currently they create enough electricity to run the factory and the employee village on the plantation for 10 months of the year; the other months they use Zesco.

Of course, I'm sure some of our details are slightly off - there was a lot of information to take in at once! But hopefully we got most of the details correct!