Last week I went back to Haiti to spend a few days working with a women coop that processes the Moringa leaves for our Moringa Project. Together with two good friends we worked on infrastructure improvements, including new leaf washing and drying facilities, and also conducted a training on hygiene and good manufacturing practices. By the end of the visit we produced one of the first samples of Moringa leaf powder that will be sent to a lab for quality testing.

A few days ago I wrote a post announcing the official support of the Clinton Foundation and the US company KuliKuli on the Moringa project I helped set up in Haiti over the past year. Surely exciting stuff that was worth sharing! But of course nothing to rejoice for too long, because there is SO MUCH WORK TO BE DONE!

In fact, I have to admit something: of course I already knew for quite some time that the Clinton Foundation and Kuli Kuli would get involved. I just couldn’t announce it until everything was official. Behind the scenes, however, we have spent the past few months working hard to get everything ready for the project to move into the next phase: actual production.

As you can imagine working with small scale farmers in rural Haiti comes along with a bunch of challenges. One of the biggest of those is ensuring consistent high quality of our product, something any international buyer is adamant about. Since our aim is export to the international market we have focussed mostly on improving quality of the leaf powder (that the women coop had started already started producing themselves).

During the past few weeks we have evaluated the way in which the women have been processing Moringa leaves until now. From that we came up with a list of recommendations for improvement.Last week’s visit was all about implementing the necessary changes to ensure that from now on processing will take place in a more efficient, hygienic way, resulting in the high quality leaf powder we are looking for. We made upgrades to some of the existing infrastructure and conducted a training on hygiene and good manufacturing practices.

After a few intense but productive days we left the coop with a few samples of leaf powder that will be tested in a US lab. If those samples come back good we’re set to start producing. Exciting times!!

Keep Growing!