Lagos to unveil Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest food logistics hub, activating US$303M offtake guarantee fund

NIGERIA – Lagos State has announced plans to commission Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest food logistics hub in Ketu-Ereyun, Epe, a facility integrating cold storage, dry warehousing, processing and repackaging centres, capable of handling 1.5 million metric tonnes of food annually while activating a ₦500 billion (approximately US$303 million) Offtake Guarantee Fund.

The Lagos Central Food Systems and Logistics Hub addresses a critical gap in Nigeria’s food value chain: the absence of organised aggregation points and standardised packaging infrastructure. 

Commissioner for Agriculture and Food Systems, Abisola Olusanya, explained that Lagos grapples with supply chain disruptions, rising transportation costs, poor storage infrastructure, and huge post-harvest losses due to its dependence on food supplies from outside the state.

Packaging at the Core of Food Preservation

Post-harvest losses in Nigeria are estimated at 30-50 percent for perishable crops. 

The hub’s repackaging centres are designed to address a fundamental packaging failure: food arriving from multiple smallholder farms in varied, non-standardised containers must be sorted, cleaned, and repackaged into uniform, market-ready packaging, graded cartons, sealed bags, or portioned trays, before distribution to retailers and food service operators.

For Lagos’s food system, this packaging standardisation is not cosmetic; it determines shelf life, transportability, and consumer trust.

Logistics as the Backbone of Food Security

The facility can accommodate over 1,500 trucks daily and features cold and dry storage facilities, warehouses, aggregation points, truck parks, and quality control laboratories. 

The cold storage component preserves perishables; the digital trading platform adds price transparency, reducing the information asymmetry that often leaves farmers at the mercy of intermediary traders. 

For logistics providers, the hub consolidates fragmented supply chains, allowing fuller truckloads, optimised routes, and reduced empty backhauls.

The Offtake Guarantee Mechanism

The ₦500 billion Offtake Guarantee Fund activates a guaranteed market for farmers, protecting them from price collapse while creating a predictable demand signal that farmers outside the state can plan around. 

Olusanya stated that the first phase is scheduled for commissioning this year, marking a major turning point in Lagos State’s food systems transformation journey. 

By aggregating demand at scale, the hub enables bulk purchasing of packaging materials, corrugated boxes, liners, labels, reducing per-unit costs that smaller distributors cannot achieve individually.

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