By Salami Adeyinka
Nigeria has over 3 million hectares of land suitable for oil palm cultivation, yet it spends roughly $500 to $600 million on palm oil imports every year, a crop it already grows at home. The country has the land, the climate, and the smallholder base to be self-sufficient. What it has never had is the processing infrastructure to convert what its farms produce into something the market can actually use. That gap has been bleeding foreign exchange for decades, and it remains largely unfixed.
The farms are not the problem. More than 80% of Nigeria’s palm oil comes from smallholder farmers, and the cultivation exists at scale. The problem is everything that happens after harvest: processing, certification, quality management, and documentation. The infrastructure layer that turns raw agricultural output into something an institutional buyer, an export market, or a modern retailer can actually trust has been largely absent, and the country has been paying for it in foreign exchange every year.
Daylong Group, founded in 2022 and headquartered in Lagos, is one of the few companies trying to build it. What makes Daylong market worthy is not just that they grow palm oil or process spices. It is that they are approaching a decidedly old-economy problem, food supply chain fragmentation, with the same logic a technology company would use: own the full stack, instrument every layer, and make the output verifiable.
Owning the Chain
Daylong operates across three states simultaneously. Edo hosts the palm oil plantation and refinery. Kaduna handles spice cleaning, grading, and industrial dehydration at source. Lagos is the packaging headquarters and distribution hub. Six business platforms run across this footprint: refined palm oil, spices and heat ingredients, proprietary flavour blends, industrial ingredient supply for B2B manufacturers, a consumer FMCG brand called Daylong Foods, and an export arm targeting AfCFTA and diaspora markets.
To understand why that footprint matters, it helps to understand the size of the market Daylong is operating in. The Nigerian palm oil market was valued at $545 million in 2024 and is forecast to reach $785 million by 2033, growing at a compound annual rate of 4.19 per cent. Nigeria produces 1.4 million tonnes of palm oil annually but consumes approximately 2.5 million tonnes, leaving a domestic supply gap that currently must be filled by expensive imports. For a vertically integrated domestic producer with certified products and documented quality systems, that gap is not a problem. It is the opportunity.
The spice side of the business sits inside a similarly large opportunity. Nigeria is the second-largest ginger producer in the world, accounting for 16% of global production, yet it captures less than 3% of global export revenues from it. The country’s annual spice export potential is estimated at $2 billion, a figure it falls well short of, as processing and packaging infrastructure has not kept pace with what the ground produces. Daylong’s Kaduna facility, which handles spice processing at the origin, is a direct investment to close that gap.
Every product line carries NAFDAC certification, but the company is explicit that certification is the floor, not the ceiling. The differentiator they are building toward is traceability, specifically batch-level documentation that lets a buyer pull the record on a specific shipment and follow it back to the field it came from, the date it was processed, and every facility it passed through. For institutional buyers such as food manufacturers, export distributors, and large retailers, this kind of supply chain visibility is increasingly a prerequisite for a supplier relationship. Most of the Nigerian market cannot provide it.
The Export Door That Just Opened
The broader market context further strengthens the invaluable case. Nigeria’s urban population sits at roughly 213 million people, a consumer base that is growing, increasingly label-conscious, and shifting toward cleaner, more traceable food products. The top ten listed FMCG companies in Nigeria posted combined revenue of N3.71 trillion in the first half of 2025, a 50% year-on-year increase, reflecting both the scale of domestic food demand and the pricing power available to companies operating in the sector. For a B2B ingredient supplier with certified, traceable products, that FMCG growth is not background noise. It is the direct market that those products feed into.
On the export side, the infrastructure that has historically made intra-African trade unworkable for mid-market operators is changing. In May 2025, Nigeria launched the East and Southern Africa Air Cargo Corridor through a partnership with Uganda Airlines, offering rates up to 70 per cent below commercial carriers. In May 2026, the corridor was expanded through a new partnership with RwandAir, extending to Kigali, Lusaka, and Harare, with cargo rates now below $2 per kilogram across all routes. Before this corridor existed, Nigerian exporters moving goods to East and Southern Africa were paying between $3 and $10 per kilogram, rates that made regional export commercially unworkable for most mid-market operators. Nigeria’s non-oil exports to non-ECOWAS African countries grew from $150 million in 2024 to $207 million in 2025 as a direct result, with agro-processed goods among the primary beneficiaries.
Alongside this, the government has set a palm oil self-sufficiency target for 2050, cut import tariffs to incentivise domestic processing investment, and launched a national traceability framework for the sector. For a company that has spent four years building certified, documented, export-ready products, the convergence of domestic demand growth, trade infrastructure, and favourable policy is precisely the environment an early-stage investment is designed to catch before the wider market does.
Daylong’s model asks a straightforward question: what happens when you apply genuine operational discipline and verifiable technology to an agricultural value chain that has never had either? Nigeria’s food import bill, and the market data sitting behind it, suggest the answer is worth finding out.
