Spring in our step: SA signs R300m chicken feet export deal with China

You can also listen to this podcast on iono.fm here.

Download the free LiSTN audio app on Google Play, Apple or here.

JIMMY MOYAHA: A chicken feet deal has been struck to export chicken feet to China. It’s a R300 million deal, and it was struck by a partnership through Wesgrow [and] Standard Bank, South Africa, and a very, very busy founder of a company called AskCarlaKote, who is Carla Nolte.

Carla is joining me on the line to discuss this deal. Good evening, Carla. Thanks for taking the time. Where do you even find a market for chicken feet outside South Africa?

CARLA NOLTE: Everywhere, really. Chicken feet are consumed ironically in quite a few places outside South Africa – including the US. It is so rich in collagen and everybody’s looking for the Fountain of Youth – and it might just be in chicken feet.

JIMMY MOYAHA: So how did this deal happen? Wesgrow, Standard Bank, yourself – obviously there are a lot of moving parts that go into this. Can you shed some light on the deal – how it was structured and how long the deal is in place for?

CARLA NOLTE: Well, the structuring and the length of the contract – it’s structured in such a way that we are trying to empower. It’s from an empowerment point of view because it [involves] quite a bit of job creation.

It’s initially in place for the next five years but, once proven, you’re not going to stop buying from where you’re getting what you’re looking for.

It came in place purely from the [efforts of] Thiru Naidoo of Wesgrow. I work very close with the Africa desk at Wesgrow. She had posed the question and the Africa desk redirected her to me. Honestly, when the call came through we had some load shedding and a really bad connection. I thought she had asked for chicken feed, and I was brokering a maize deal at the time, so it seemed quite a synchronous incident.

Then the spec came through from the client in China, and I [thought] oh, okay, feet, different product. But we persevered.

Like I said, the question had been posed. I am fond of puzzles. It became a puzzle because we then discovered that the market access needed to be sorted out. Like I said, I’m a trade solutions company. So that was a problem that needed solving.

Once I started on that journey, I kind of could not stop myself.

JIMMY MOYAHA: And boy, did you solve the problem, Carla. You touched on things around job creation, but if anyone hasn’t read about this deal, Carla understated it when she said it’s an empowerment deal because it ticks many, many of the boxes that are needed in South Africa.

There’s job creation there. About 540 tonnes a month are going to be exported from women-owned farms in South Africa.

That’s so important to the agricultural sector, but also to job creation and empowerment and everything else that we are working towards as a country and you managed to get that all wrapped up in one little deal and put a nice bow on it!

CARLA NOLTE: Yes, I think so. [Laughing]

JIMMY MOYAHA: Well, it’s not a little deal, I suppose.

CARLA NOLTE: In the grander scheme of things, I honestly did not think it would gather this much attention. But in the grander scheme of things I think because it started out as a little deal – which means it commercially wasn’t appealing to the commercial sector, which I completely understand – you have your loss leaders and you have things that maybe are not worth the time at that level.

That is why we turned to our little cooperative that came on board to help with me. I have an agri partner, [and] when we are looking for trade solutions I call in a bunch of people around me – my network is my net worth – and my agri partner then found me my farmer, and we puzzled it out.

How would we be able to do this at the scale that it started at, which was not big enough for commercial but not small enough for one particular subsistence farmer?

We created sort of a cooperative model. And thankfully, or maybe just because of alignment, it happened to be mostly female farmers.

But let’s face it, we always take up the call to do what we need to do to get it done. The best thing about it is that skills development is so prevalent in this – [in] that particular space of poultry farming. It’s something that you are repetitively doing over a period of 30 to 35 days, and then you rinse and repeat, which means you get better at it every single time.

So to go from novice to expert is quite a short journey, unlike in other farming and agri sectors.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Carla, you mentioned the fact that this becomes a very empowering endeavour when you look at it. And obviously with this one deal we’re looking at close to 3 000 jobs and obviously more secondary effects that are positive towards those local economies and those local farms.

But this wasn’t the only deal. There was already a second query – to export into the rest of Asia. Can you shed some light on how that is progressing? It might not be finalised at this stage, but are there also plans to export other products? Are they also asking us for chicken livers?

CARLA NOLTE: Yes, you can’t say to a farmer ‘sell your feet’. The feet are attached to a chicken.

We have to solve the whole equation and therefore we are discussing the rest of the chicken, the portions, into the rest of Asia as well as everything else – chicken and its parts; its sum of the parts is used for so many things.

So I haven’t provided a solution if I’ve left it with a bigger problem than to solve my one problem. So that’s my focus right now. I’m focusing not just on the rest of Asia, but on our own continent as well.

So yes, those talks are progressing very well, to be fair. But let us focus on what we can solve, and what we sort of have puzzled out, and prove ourselves in a sense. It’s always best to under-promise and over-deliver.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Absolutely. And we continue to support your endeavours in that regard. Hopefully we can increase those exports. That’s always going to be good for our trade balance or reducing that trade deficit that we have as a country, and we thank you for your contributions towards that, Carla.

That’s Carla Nolte, who is the founder of AskCarlaKote, a business that struck a deal with the Chinese – through a couple of partners in South Africa – to export chicken feet into the Chinese market.