Abuja-based investment firm Sabou Capital has extended a $2 million impact-linked debt facility to Tomato Jos Farming and Processing Limited, the Nigerian tomato-paste manufacturer that is positioning itself to seize a market suddenly closed to imports.
The naira-denominated loan, announced on Wednesday, will fund the expansion of Tomato Jos’s smallholder farmer network and add to its processing capacity in Kaduna State, a northern region that rarely attracts institutional capital.
The deal arrives after the federal government last year banned imports of tomato paste, a policy designed to force the country’s estimated $400 million annual import bill into local production. Before the ban, as much as 90% of processed tomato demand was met from overseas, largely from China and Italy, despite Nigeria being Africa’s second-largest grower of fresh tomatoes. The prohibition has removed the dominant competition overnight, leaving the field open to domestic processors.
“Tomato Jos is exactly the kind of business we back — one that turns an import dependency into local jobs, farmer income and a stronger domestic economy,” said Surayyah Ahmad, managing partner at Sabou Capital. “We structured this deal so that our financial return grows with the impact they create.”
The facility is structured as impact-linked debt, a financing instrument that ties the lender’s return to agreed social and economic outcomes. Under the arrangement, part of Sabou’s yield is adjusted against metrics such as the number of smallholder farmers reached, the volume of tomatoes sourced from women-led farms, and overall rural employment. If the company meets or exceeds the targets, its cost of capital can fall. The mechanism turns traditional debt into a tool that rewards both scale and inclusion.
Tomato Jos directly employs 204 people and sources tomatoes from more than 3,000 smallholder farmers, 60% of whom are women. The company meets all four criteria of the 2X Challenge, a global benchmark for gender-lens investing, making the deal one of the more structured gender-smart financing packages in Nigeria’s agribusiness sector.
Founded in 2014 by Indian-American entrepreneur Mira Mehta, Tomato Jos operates a vertically integrated model that spans its own farm, a processing facility in Kangimi, Kaduna, and a branded tomato paste line sold across West Africa. Mehta, a former consultant, launched the business after witnessing post-harvest losses of up to 45% in the tomato value chain — fruit would rot before reaching factories or markets, even as Nigeria spent hundreds of millions of dollars on imported paste.
The company’s plant can process roughly 70 metric tonnes of fresh tomatoes per day, turning a highly seasonal and perishable crop into shelf-stable paste, puree and sachets. In a country that consumes more than 2.3 million tonnes of fresh tomatoes annually, bridging the gap between harvest and processing is the industry’s central challenge.
“The opportunity in front of us is real, but so is the competition; we’re up against international organisations with deep pockets,” Mehta said. “We are grateful to investors like Sabou who understand why our business matters beyond the cheque they write and the financial return they will get, because supporting us means supporting a community of over 10,000 small farmers and their families.”
The competition she refers to ranges from large multinational food companies with established supply chains to deep-pocketed local conglomerates. Dangote Group, Nigeria’s largest industrial player, operates a tomato processing plant in Kano State, but its operations have been punctuated by raw material shortages — a reminder that scale alone does not guarantee a steady supply of tomatoes. Tomato Jos’s outgrower programme, combined with its own cultivation, is intended to overcome the fragmentation that has frustrated bigger rivals.
Kaduna State itself presents a mixed picture. While its position in the tomato belt gives it agronomic advantages, it is also a region where insecurity — banditry and farmer-herder conflict — has disrupted farming communities and raised operating costs. That an Abuja-based fund is willing to deploy structured credit there is a deliberate bet on the company’s ability to manage risk in a place commercial lenders typically avoid.
Sabou Capital focuses on growth-stage small and medium enterprises in Nigeria, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, offering adaptive credit and structured debt to companies in agribusiness, essential consumer services, fintech, healthcare and logistics. Its strategy explicitly targets underserved markets outside the continent’s major commercial capitals, backing businesses that generate employment for women, young people and smallholder communities. The firm expects to announce additional investments through the remainder of 2026.
For Tomato Jos, the new funds arrive at a pivotal moment. The import ban has created a captive market for locally made paste, but converting that policy window into lasting market share requires capital to expand sourcing, raise factory utilisation and build brand recognition before global competitors find workarounds or domestic rivals scale up. With a farmer network of thousands already in place and a processing asset built, the company has the raw materials to grow — what it has lacked is the patient, flexible financing to match its ambitions.
The deal also adds a data point to the argument that well-structured debt can support agricultural industrialisation in sub-Saharan Africa better than equity alone. By linking returns to impact metrics rather than aggressive growth-at-all-costs, the instrument accommodates the slower, lumpier pace of value chain building. For investors, it offers a route to generate commercial returns while advancing development goals that, in this case, include replacing imports with domestically produced food and putting incomes into the hands of thousands of smallholder farmers.
As tomato paste sachets produced in Kaduna move onto shop shelves that were once stocked exclusively with imported tins, Tomato Jos will test whether a homegrown manufacturing model can hold its ground against the deep pockets and scale of international competition. The Sabou facility gives it at least the financial run-up to try.