“Our main goal is to give the population everything that is fresh and natural,” says Tamu Mucasa, a company employee.
GIASOP’s main strengths lie in fruit juices (it currently produces mango, guava, pineapple, granadilla and orange juices), milk and dairy products. For its cattle-breeding segment, the company dedicates a generous part of its resources to growing high-quality corn.
“As we say around here, a cow produces milk via its mouth. This means that if we feed our cows with the best products, they will produce a much better quality milk,” highlights Mr Mucasa. “We have two breeds of cow. The American Oise that produces a large quantity of milk and a small one called Holstein that produces 4% milk. Hence, we can produce excellent quality butter.”
Feliciano Nije, director of cattle feed production, says the company harvests some 12,000 tonnes of corn per year, all of which goes to feed the cattle. Aside from butter, GIASOP also markets fresh milk, a sour milk called massana, cheese and yoghurt. According to day manager Jess Bernardi, the company produces 2,600 litres per day. “We milk 230 animals now at an average of 9.6 litres per cow,” he says. “There is big potential and we are hoping to milk 2,000 more cows in the future.”
As for beef cattle, GIASOP has crossbred the South African Brahman with the local Mucubal, creating a new breed called Brahmucu, which gains weight in half the time it takes for other types of cows. GIASOP presently has a partnership with German company Ferrostaal to supply the Angolan firm’s factories with dairy equipment. Neto Rocha, another GIASOP employee, highlights that there are great opportunities to “bring more Germans to Angola. It would be wonderful to have more German technology here because we know it’s the best in the world.”
Nevertheless, an employee in GIASOP’s fertiliser division says despite having Canadian, French, American and South African equipment, his department has no German equipment, yet it is their desire to have some since “German machinery is of the highest standard in the world. We believe that German machines could help us solve small difficulties we encounter here now. "Tamu Mucasa, who underscores the importance of GIASOP’s community efforts and job opportunities, would also like to see a German partnership in training programmes. “We cannot invest only in machines, we need to invest in the qualification of our community. Human resources is an important factor for us,” he says.
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