Padre Pio Bakery Adopts High Quality Cassava Flour for Its Specialty Bread

Pio Bakery is one of the new bakeries that has adopted high quality cassava flour (HQCF) in their bakery products. It is located at Lusangazi just outside the city of Mzuzu in northern region of Malawi. The products include German specialty bread mainly that is low in gluten for a niche market in Lilongwe City, standard white bread for the general public sold at the bakery and some shops in the city of Mzuzu. The bakery uses 20% HQCF in their products and uses packages that are well labelled indicating that cassava is included. It sources HQCF from processing groups supported by CAVA 2 from Nkhata Bay district. Linkages between the bakery and processing groups and aggregation is done by the regional committee of the National Cassava Processors Association which was also created by CAVA project. The market arrangement between the bakery and processors has provided market opportunities for smallholder farmers who sell fresh roots to the processing plants. CAVA plans to intensify training on quality management to all processors to ensure that the bakery gets HQCF which has consistent quality and encourage construction of additional racks to increase volumes of HQCF.