The food nostalgia of Ethiopians in the diaspora has given rise to a multimillion dollar injera export industry.
Kidus Tessema, who lived in Sweden for years before returning to Addis Ababa to set up an injera bakery six years ago, says nothing in the world tastes quite like the traditional large flatbread staple made in Ethiopia.
His company, Novelle Care Imports, produces around 10,000 loaves of injera daily, of which about two-thirds are for export.
While in Sweden he tried everything to make injera that tasted the same as in Ethiopia. “I tried it when the weather was the same as in Ethiopia, but it didn’t work,” he says. He even carried Ethiopian water to Sweden.
He laughs. “I don’t know, maybe it’s from God, but it doesn’t work in any other countries.”
Even the gluten-free and nutritious grain injera is made of can’t be grown properly anywhere else, he says. “Teff produced outside of Ethiopia doesn’t taste the same as Ethiopian teff. Nobody has discovered the reason behind this.”
Injera is made by mixing teff flour and water and leaving it to ferment for two days. On the third day, it is baked using big, round pans.
Ethiopian injera comes at a premium abroad, mainly due to the air freight cost. It is sold to restaurants at $1.80 (R31) a piece, almost five times the local price.
But many are willing to pay. Exports of the staple brought in $36m over the first three quarters of the 2021/22 financial year, but it’s still dwarfed by the country’s 1,000t-a-day coffee exports, which earned more than half a billion dollars in the first half 2021/22, according to the Ethiopia Coffee and Tea Authority.
These are big forex earners in a country where dollars are in short supply and economic growth has slowed in the wake of the pandemic and a bloody conflict in the north of the country.
There are almost 60 companies focusing on injera exports now, Tessema says, five times more than in 2020.
Injera exports are nothing new. During the government’s teff export ban from 2006 to 2015, due to fears of a food shortage, the export of injera was still allowed.
Around 130t of injera per week is exported on Ethiopian Airlines alone, to cities that are host to large Ethiopian expat populations — Washington DC, Stockholm, Oslo, Dubai, London and Toronto — says Ethiopian Airlines spokesperson Ali Mohammed.
The food is kept fresh through temperature-controlled transport from the bakeries to the foreign destination.
Tessema mostly uses Ethiopian Airways, but when exporting to Dubai or Qatar he uses airlines based in those countries.
He says the first step to ensuring injera stays fresh is to avoid bacteria and ship it on the day of production. “When we bake the injera, we don’t touch it by hand, we use gloves.”
The business, which has a turnover of $2m a year, directly employs 35 workers, 33 of whom are women, who bake the injera in three shifts around the clock.
Indirectly, his factory provides work for at least 50 people, from the farmer to the transport workers.
Injera is our ambassador. It is our culture and traditional food. People love to eat injera
— Kidus Tessema
Tessema says he wants to increase production to 25,000 loaves of injera a day in the near future, which means acquiring more equipment, factory space and employing more workers.
He is optimistic that the construction of the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam’s 6,450MW hydropower project will in future reduce his reliance on generators during intermittent power outages and allow for increased production.
For now, he doesn’t foresee a time when demand for his injera will decrease.
“Injera is our ambassador,” Tessema says. “It is our culture and traditional food. People love to eat injera.”
It’s also touted as a home-grown solution to food insecurity on the continent.
US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, speaking in Ghana last year, said: “We want to see an Africa that provides for Africa, with self-sustaining food supplies that translates peace into sugar, bread, chapattis, injera and jollof rice that you can share with the globe. Your potential is simply extraordinary.”
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