 How are you all doing? Welcome back to the YouTube channel, it's your favorite village boy Mr. Ghana baby right here and I'm back again with another eye-opening video. I feel like I live in Ghana but I've been so blind all this while, you know why? I'm a big fan of cocoa products and you know that I got 50 acres of cocoa farm and I never knew that cocoa has another additional value. All I knew was that you can only use cocoa for chocolate, you can only use cocoa for Milo but I never knew that you can actually use cocoa for wine. And the person doing this is actually a Ghanaian in Ghana and so many Ghanaians are not talking about it. You know what, before I show you the man behind this innovation, do me a favor, like the video. It's very important, like this video, share, so that every African can have a piece of it. Before I even start this interview, I want to tell you, are you called? In the Vota region, how do you guys say are you called? Miwela Edoji. Miwela Edoji. Miwela, so on behalf of all Africans, we say Miwela Edoji. You're doing something that I think the whole country needs to celebrate you. Do you know that? Well, if you say so, how can I say? I never knew that you can actually get wine from cocoa, cashew, and what nest? Coffee. How did you come about with this? Yeah, you can get wine from most fruits actually. If I interestingly, it is scientifically proven that we should be able to make better wines from cocoa than grape, because cocoa has more of the antioxidants that are at some of the ingredients that you will need in wine. But you can find cocoa everywhere in Ghana? You can find cocoa mostly from the forest zone, in the forest zone everywhere in Ghana you can find cocoa. Are you doing a large scale production or small scale? No, we are still at the nascent level. This is really a hobby that we are trying to see if we can commercialize. So, which means no one is supporting what you are doing then? At the moment, no. We are hoping for some future things in the pipeline. How long have you been doing this? I've been doing this as a hobby for about eight years. But we started making trickles maybe four years ago, from four years ago. Let me understand. My name is Mr. Ghana Baby. You said I should call myself Mr. African Baby. Can you tell us a bit about yourself? Yeah, my main job is an electrical technical university, and I teach entrepreneurship. So, what inspired me to begin this is we've been criticized for the way we teach economics entrepreneurship. So, we wanted to demonstrate to our students that it is possible to make premium products from localities around us. So, I decided to set this up as a sort of a model business for my students to emulate. This also explains the reason why we have not scaled up on the biggest scale until now. Now, yeah, one making was a hobby picked up from Scotland. Over there, they make wine called country wines, which means wines that are made from other fruits rather than wine. So, they are able to make wine from strawberry, blackberry, black currants, the fruits. Sometimes, banana, the fruits they have, they have, they are not grape. So, when I came, I applied the same idea, and then through the sciences, we got to know that Koko is one of the fruits that we have in Canada that can make a magnificent wine as well. What were you doing in Scotland? How long? So, you're back? Would you say that it's possible to make it in Ghana or it's possible to make it in the West? We're talking about this wine as a Koko wine, but the truth again is all the packaging materials have to come from outside. And that makes it expensive. Sometimes, yes, the raw material chunk of the things are here, but some of the other things you need to turn into an attractive product you still have to import. And this is normally in Ghana. That's how manufacturing is all over the world. So, we got to make the system easier so that if you have to produce a mufacha, you can get your input quite easily and not too expensive so that your product can be competitive on the international market. So, which means the raw materials, the wine itself, everything was produced in Ghana? Here in Ghana, everything from scratch from Ghana, but the bottles are imported. The corks that are imported, the seal on top is imported. Which makes it like, it's going to make the whole product expensive then? Yeah, it makes the product expensive because the factors you have when you are importing raw materials into Ghana, particularly for small businesses who are not producing on a large scale, it's so expensive. The packaging takes about seventy percent of our cost of production. Seventy percent? Yeah. On this notice, I want to ask what are the major challenges that you face as a small scale business? Yeah, because you are producing on a small scale, the name of the game in manufacturing and for packaging in particular is the volumes. So, if you are ordering bottles, labels, corks in volumes, you get it at a lower price. But if you are importing it on a small, small quantity, it ends up being so expensive for you. But the only way you can get the material is also to import it. I know cocoa to be non-acoholic. Yeah, the fruit is, it's not a cocoa that is an alcoholic cocoa. Once you start, you crack the cocoa pods, you start fermenting right away. And the fermentation turns into alcohol, the bipolar of the fruitus and the yeast is the alcohol. So that means that you extract the cocoa beans from the cocoa pods? We extract the cocoa pods from the cocoa pods and leave the beans. So it's the part that is used to make white wine. But if you have to make red wine, the part is white. There is some cream between the cocoa shelf and the chocolate itself when you crack the cocoa beans. There is some cream between the shelf and what you eat as a chocolate. That is pink and it's full of tannin, or people will say polyphenol scientifically. That's how we try to make red wine. And it normally produces natural rosé wine, which we tend to red wine. I'm a bit confused and I believe that a lot of people watching us might also be confused. So I'm too scientific here. Too scientific? So you know what, I want to see a bit of the production. No problem. So I feel cocoa is actually an interesting fruit against the taste. One of the pharmacologically active fruits you can find. So if you take the cocoa pods, it's a fruit. The beans have creams around it. That cream is white. You take that cream, you extract the cream and it's like a juice. So you introduce this into that juice and that makes white wine like you see in the glass here. I don't want to do that. So like you see in the glass here is white wine. You can make white wine from the cocoa pods and still sell our beans or turn the beans into chocolate. So the beans are just by products. But if you want to make red wine, the pods you get there will produce a white wine for you. The red wine, there is something in the cocoa beans itself in between the beans and in between the beans and this shell. There is a cream pink cream which you have to ferment a bit. And then you can extract from the beans. And that color is like the juice. The pink color is like the juice. It drains away from the cocoa when you are processing it. It doesn't stay with the cocoa when you dry it because it's a juice. If you ferment the cocoa beans, it becomes liquid and you will draw from the beans. So you still have your chocolate or your cocoa beans. So we are able to ferment that again over one year to turn it into a red wine. Over a year? Did you say over a year? Over a year, all the wines we have to. First you produce the wine, you get alcohol you want within two months. Then you allow the wine to mellow and clear, be beautiful in the glass. And it takes about a year. Can we see one of those like where you found your red wine? So that means it makes the process capital intensive. You need to have capacity vessels to keep your wine. You're not doing anything with it, you just need to store it. So which means you do yearly production then? Yes, so we produce when the fruit is available. So it's now cocoa season so we are producing wine from cocoa. When the cocoa is over, we get to cashew season and produce wine from cashew. This looks like chocolate. This is chocolate. Yes, that's what it's actually called chocolate. Chocolate is not chocolate bar. This is chocolate. That's why we call it raw chocolate. This is the real chocolate. If you eat this, you get all that cocoa has to offer. If you eat chocolate bar, if you buy a bar of chocolate from the western market, you'll be lucky to have two of these beans in it. You know, I'm not a fan of things that don't have sugar. Dita, yes. I tell you what to do. If you don't want to, if you eat it, you don't get a bitterness. But if you purely get bitterness, the bitterness is the turning or the medicine in cocoa. So if you eat it raw like this? Yes, if you treat it that way, you will not hear a bitterness similar to that. No, it's true. I thought they add sugar to cocoa beans so that we don't have bitterness. No, we roast this in a sort of way to hide it. The bitterness is still there but we hide it. If you finish eating it before you feel it. I'm going to get back to you after a little bit. These are not bottles? No, they are pouches. So they are like dispensers. You dispense the wine instead of keeping wines in a bottle. That is quite expensive. Sometimes wines are packed in a bottle or pouches. Right now it's hobby and it's also more commercial. Where do you want to see this wine factory in the next five years? I would like to be producing wines from here and selling all over Ghana abroad. The few bottles in the supermarket or dispensers in the supermarket in Europe. It's fine. How do we make this dream come true then? What is hindering the dream for not happening this year next year? We need some sort of promoters. Investors and promoters to come on board. First stick the wines to where we are not able to send them to. For promoters I'm here so you shouldn't worry about that. But you need investors. You know what, if you have seen the potential, you can see what this can do for Ghana and the entire Africa. And I believe that this man really needs our support. He is an entrepreneur lecturer so he knows how to do business. He has been doing it in classrooms. I decided to come out and let the students have somebody that they can look up to. I believe that I'm also here and I can look up to him. So investing your money into his business is something that I know that you're going to gain the profit in future. So do me a favour. Reach out to him directly. I'm not even going to have anything to do with it. And talk to him if you guys can. Talk about how much percentage, what he needs. And then let's take it from there. I want to ask you a question. If you have a message for Africans, what would that message be? Well we have a lot of potentials. With the rumors not building today. Once we continue to work hard, we will get there. The room was not built in a day. But I realised that all the equipment that we use are more like a basic equipment. Yes, because this is an indigenous business and it's always a good idea if you are starting a business not to go to... Because we are operating an environment where the market is small it's difficult to build volumes. So if you bring a sophisticated machine you will need a lot of technicians, engineers maintain them, pay them before you can build it. And you might not be able to afford it so you'll get best. But small, small machines you can all just use them by yourself. Get to a station until you think you need to build volumes then you can automate. What do you love to partner with Kazakrako? Well I think one making is slightly different from the slurry. There the distilled wine, the distilled alcohol here we make wine slowly. So they are slightly different processes. But in terms of the channel where they sell their drinks I think there's a lot we can partner with or collaborate with. If you had the chance to change one thing in Africa what would it be? See one thing or... Change one thing in Africa, what would you change? Well, I don't have a dream to change things in Africa. I don't think I have even thought about that. But I think Africans are resilient. We just have to continue to work hard. Improve upon our mentality. Because if we don't use our own things and promote it and accept it nobody else will come by it and pay. If we keep admiring Western things Western culture, Western products and not admiring ours, patronising ours we cannot add value to it. It looks like most of the great things we have the value is being added by Westerners so without them we don't have value. So we got to be using our own things and we proud of what we can do, what we got. Then we work hard and we will get there. Can we find your wine? My wines are available largely in the main supermarket CDM Gate supermarket and something wine shops in Accra. We are at Kanda Estate Joy Wine. We are also a side wine at counterweights. Because we are actually a small business we tend to sell more directly to customers. You can always get in touch with us and then we deliver to you where you are. We are making effort to be in a shop the shop of Accra Mall. We hope to be in Accra Mall this year. Are you a spot in here? No, no too small to be a spot in here. But a lot of tourists who are in Ghana like our wine and they come and get a bottle of tea as a souvenir home. If you are living in Ghana, let's do this for him. Let's make sure that the wines that he has in here we finish it all. It's a must, you know that I don't beg. It's by force. I'm going to call you after one week if I upload this video. If you tell me that I want to know if there is still wine or there are no more wine. I want to say thank you so much for sharing your story with me and I really appreciate it.