Cocoa Grinding Plant to be Operational by July

Barry Callebaut's cocoa grinding plant in the Ghanaian port of Tema is expected to start operations by July, a source at the Swiss chocolate and cocoa group said.

The source told Reuters construction plans for the plant, which will have an initial installed capacity of 30,000 tonnes of beans per year, were on track.

"The main Barth grinding machines have arrived," the source told Reuters. The plant, almost an exact copy of Barry Callebaut's SACO facility in San Pedro in neighbouring Ivory Coast, is scheduled to double its capacity to 60,000 tonnes within the next two years.

"But it looks like we are going to extend the capacity much sooner," the source said.

The plant in Tema, 20 km (12.5 miles) west of the capital Accra, will only produce cocoa liquor like SACO, which has a capacity of 35,000 tonnes of beans per year.

The source at Barry Callebaut said the possibility of frequent power cuts, which other Ghana-based grinders say hamper their output and machines, had been taken into account.

A source at the West African Mills Company Ltd (WAMCO), a joint venture between Germany's Hosta Group of Companies and Ghana's Cocoa Board, told Reuters earlier this week that the company suffered up to five power cuts a day and black-outs lasting several days.

Stand-by generators cannot run for more than several hours a day. Barry Callebaut's plant is the third cocoa processing plant in Ghana.

The largest is WAMCO which increased its capacity last year to 70,000 from 50,000 tonnes per year.

Then the Portem cocoa processing plant in Tema is wholly owned by the Cocoa Processing Company (CPC), a full subsidiary of Ghana's Cocoa Board. Its installed capacity is 25,000 tonnes of beans per year