In this interview with KEHINDE OSASONA and SAMSON BENJAMIN, the Sales Manager of a United Kingdom-based Refrigeration and Air Condition engineering company UK Cold, Michael Anthony, tells us about the company’s new technologies and other sundry issues.
What specifically is your specialty?
My company is a refrigeration company with specialties in building cold rooms and offering temperature control solutions for the Agriculture, Health, Livestock, Hospitality, Pharmaceutical and Corporate sector globally.
We also carry out installations and maintenance which focuses on cold rooms for industries. The second part is a full-fledge maintenance and training arms where in-house engineers run a three- months intensive course in our academy, where they are introduced to the basic refrigeration engineering skills.
The purpose of doing that was to create an avenue for employment opportunities and an empowerment tools through which people can be self-employed.
As we speak, Nigeria is getting populated daily and there is need to proffer solution to some of our glaring challenges especially in the area of science and technology.
Maintenance culture in the country by our company assessment is also a big factor to look into. We just don’t have maintenance culture and that is the reason why we are depreciating in value, assets and infrastructure.
So in essence, my company is about to replicate all of what we have done in the United Kingdom in Nigeria through our subsidiary UK Cold Nigeria so as to create value for ourselves.
If we may ask, how does your company intend to do this?
Well, if you look at it the challenges are different. The first thing we look at is how we can use our expertise in cooling to enhance agricultural business and sector as the case may be.
This we intend to offer by bringing in our new technology which is capable of eradicating seasonal food wastages being experienced in the country.
Statistics has it that over 35% of food from harvest is wasted in Nigeria based on poor agricultural storage, particularly perishable ones or even dairies.
So, my company thought of using it expertise to come and build cold rooms in the farm place and market places. With our cooling specialty, farmers can always increase the availability of food without adding any additional fertilizer but by merely improving our storage.
Considering Nigeria’s peculiar challenge, have you thought of power to generate it?
Definitely it uses power. Cold rooms rely on solar power and majorly we are also going to be running via it whether on small or large scale.
Don’t also forget that the intended locations that we are looking forward to are farms and market places like I mentioned earlier where powers are not regular.
The cold rooms will come with monitoring device where you can carry out some monitoring because it has to be at a particular temperature steadily for a while so as to avert fluctuation.
Why if we may ask?
Reason being that temperature affects quality of whatever you put in storage
In doing that, we intend to partner the government at all levels such that there would be at least one cold room, in every 774 local government area in the country.
Considering the effect of climate change and even acclimatization, are you not worried about your technology effectiveness?
All you need do is look around the world. Look at India and even countries that are doing well in agriculture, they have these things. So, it is not new.
On acclimatization and effectiveness, Base on our recent research, we are aware of something similar in the East where a company is trying to do something on a small scale for daily observation of their products.
There is an evolving trend today in the global world if you must know. For example with the global warming no; it is a big issue around the globe, refrigeration gas is being phased out.
Now from 2020, some of the gas we are using would soon be phased out. So, we need to source some of the would-be trainers from both the street and institutions for the training.
What about getting manpower to replicate the blueprint here is that not a challenge?
First and foremost, let us correct the impression that the technology is new here because people have been using cold rooms in Lagos. We met some major players there and 90% of cold room in Nigeria is used for livestock or fish.
So, we do have massive production in this country, it is just for us to think of the multiple use of these products or even how to maximize it.
For us we are on top of our game and we have the manpower to sustain any challenge. I came in with three foreigners who are skilled in installation and what have you.
Again, as part of our plans, we also hope to source our engineers locally via the academy program. Presently, we are carrying out short-listing of some engineers graduate for training and re-training who will eventually run the cold rooms.
How many are we looking at here?
For the people that would be trained, we shall be doing that through our Train Equip and Empower (TEE) template. We shall be focusing on intensive training of international standard, equipping with all basic tools of refrigeration and empowering then via automatic employments.
While they would be looking at domestic and residential aspect and we on our part as company would be looking at the commercial aspect. Those are part of the way we would be empowering them.
On finance, we have our commitments for this project as far as finance is concern. The government too is expected to play some role.
We do not want to put a number to it yet as we want to base it on the commitment that we get from government and agencies, but let me put it mildly that 500 for a start and the success rate will determine what happens next.
