Inside Afri Exports: How We Run Quality Control Across Three Commodities

Our quality system is one discipline applied through three rulebooks. The discipline — documented sampling, calibrated instruments, independent lab confirmation and a retained sample from every export lot — never changes. The rulebook does, because a cashew kernel, a cured vanilla bean and a sesame seed fail in completely different ways, and a QC programme that treats them the same will miss the failure that matters.

What every lot goes through

• Sampling at intake against a written protocol — probes from a fixed proportion of bags, never a surface scoop from the doorway stack.
• Moisture read on calibrated meters, with the calibration log available to any buyer who asks.
• An independent laboratory analysis on the composite sample before the lot is confirmed for export.
• A sealed retained sample held from every export lot, so a dispute months later can be tested against the same material we shipped.
• Third-party pre-shipment inspection (SGS, Bureau Veritas or equivalent) arranged at the buyer's option — we quote it into the deal rather than resisting it.

Where the rulebooks diverge

For Tanzanian cashew, the intake questions are moisture, nut count and out-turn — the numbers that tell you what the shell is hiding. Processing runs in TBS-registered facilities and the kernel side adds defect counts and grade verification against the contract. For Tanzanian sesame, the lab work shifts to purity, admixture, oil content and free fatty acid — a seed lot can look clean to the eye and still carry admixture that fails a crushing or hulling spec.

Vanilla is the honest exception in our system: we do not process vanilla in Tanzania. Beans are graded and consolidated at origin by our partners in Madagascar and Uganda, so our control point moves upstream — moisture banding and visual inspection at consolidation, documented before the beans are packed, plus our own verification checks before the consignment is confirmed. What we sign off on is the consolidation record, not a claim to have cured the beans ourselves.

“A multi-commodity exporter earns trust one rejection at a time. The lots we refused to ship are the reason buyers accept the ones we do.”

— Asha Ngonyani, Quality Manager

Lots we turned away

The system only means something if it stops shipments, so here are three it stopped. A sesame lot arrived with paperwork claiming 99 per cent purity; our intake sieve analysis put admixture above 2 per cent, and the lot went back to the aggregator rather than into a container. A raw cashew parcel offered late in the season read 11 per cent moisture against our 10 per cent ceiling — tempting volume in a tight month, but a moisture problem in Mtwara becomes a mould problem in a ship's hold, so we declined it. And one vanilla consolidation was refused at origin when receipt checks found beans above the agreed moisture band; the partner re-sorted and we accepted only the conforming portion.

None of these stories are comfortable, and that is the point. A supplier who tells you every lot passed is describing a QC system that never says no. Ours says no several times a season, and the paperwork behind each refusal is part of the record we can walk a serious buyer through.