Gisengy to Kisoro (Uganda) The night we before we headed on, we had dinner with an old colleague of Judith that is now working at the Bralirwa Brewery in Kigali and Gisengy and happened to be there that day as well. The next morning, he had arranged a tour for us by one of his management trainees and we learned quite a lot about the plant and the process of making of beer, which had started there in 1959. The plant still uses (most of) the old brewery, but has been extended over time with two new production lines. The last extension is a state of the art cleansing, filling, labelling and packaging line. We enjoyed the tour very much and heared that ‘Turbo King’ was the local favourite beer, we decided to accept this cheeky name a try to buy it in one of the villages we would come across. Just after we filled up the car with diesel for the remaining Rwandan Francs in Ruhengeri and about an hour and a half from Gisengy, a car over took us and a loud ‘Goedemiddag’ came our way. A couple of kilometres down the road, Wilfred saw the same car next to the road and one of the them had stepped out of the car and was waving us over. At the time, we still thought it were two Dutch guys that were on holiday and were interested to know what our ‘Dutch’ car was doing in Rwanda. It turned out however that –although they were very surprised to see a Dutch car, they were not tourists, but Dutch entrepreneurs…(and coincidentally even friends of Judith her old colleague) Two years ago they started a small factory in the middle of the potato region of Rwanda and are now producing high quality kettle chips. They are the very first brand of chips produced in Rwanda, named Winnaz. When they asked if we liked to see their factory, we both were very enthusiastic, hence we followed them to their premises. Not knowing what to expect, we were impressed by the simplicity (if no ‘affordable’ efficiency could be gained, everything is still done by hand) as well as the expansion they had already bought and were installing. Even though there was no production at the time, it was very nice to step through the process with them. As plastic packaging is completely banned in Rwanda, Winnaz comes in packaging made from ‘mais and wood’ for the local market and in regular plastic lined packaging for the export market. When we end up in the warehouse at the end of the tour, they hand us a box of chips bags for the road. A very welcome gift as we had not found and/or bought any chips since we had left Zambia (and Wilfred had wanted them several times when we had a beer).
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