When Anne Janssens was looking for a new challenge after a career in the wind energy sector, looking mainly towards food, she discovered through a friend that almost half of the freshly harvested tomatoes in Kenya are destroyed because the price offered does not cover the transportation costs to market them. 

In Kenya there is also hardly any industry to make preservable products from fresh fruit and vegetables, such as soups and sauces. That is why Anne Janssens devised The Ketchup Project five years ago, which, together with local farmers, dries the freshly harvested tomatoes and turns them into ketchup. In the meantime, more than 100 farmers have joined the project, who together harvest 4 tons of tomatoes every week, grown without chemicals. Centrally in the Kenyan tomato region, The Ketchup Project has built a drying warehouse where the local population cuts the tomatoes into pieces in a very precise way and then transports them to the Netherlands by ship – to keep CO_2- emissions as low as possible. There they are processed into ketchup that contains much less sugar than the classic ketchup.   Anne Janssens estimates that fifteen percent of the Kenyan village now has an income thanks to her project and that the waste of tomatoes has dropped from forty to less than ten percent in three years.  The intention is now to expand the project even further, so that even more Kenyan peasant families can get a decent income for their tomatoes, while at the same time reducing waste. Not for nothing is the baseline of The Ketchup Project, “sauce with a cause”.

More info: www.theketchupproject.nl