Tomato drying systems in Burkina Faso
What the crop demands, what the country imposes, and what that means for capacity.
Burkinabè dry-season tomato is irrigated around Ouahigouya, Loumbila and the Kou valley, and it fails commercially in the same way every year: everything ripens within a few weeks, the roadside price collapses to near nothing, and a large share is left in the field. The country then imports tomato concentrate for most of the year.
The situation in Burkina Faso
Landlocked, so every tonne of finished product travels by road to Abidjan, Lomé or Tema before it reaches a ship. That single fact shapes the whole processing case: fresh fruit cannot make the journey, dried fruit can, and the margin sits with whoever removes the water before the truck leaves. Grid supply outside the two main cities is intermittent enough that a drying plan built around electric heat is a drying plan built around a generator.
Growing regions. Cascades, Hauts-Bassins and Comoé — Orodara, Banfora and Bobo-Dioulasso
What tomato drying demands
Tomato has the harshest yield ratio of any crop on this site: fourteen tonnes of fresh fruit for one tonne dried. That makes intake logistics, not drying, the binding constraint — and it also means a glut that would otherwise rot in the field is exactly the raw material this process wants.
Harvest calendar
November to March, with the glut in January and February. It is an irrigated dry-season crop, so the window is set by water availability and by planting date rather than by rainfall.
The working campaign window as the trade runs it. It shifts a fortnight either way with the rains.
Process parameters
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Drying temperature | 55–62 °C |
| Final moisture | 10–14 % |
| Yield (fresh : dried) | 14 : 1 |
| Cycle time | 18–26 h |
Sizing starting points from ordinary processing practice, not a validated recipe for your product. Confirm against your own intake and your buyer’s specification.
Worked sizing example
For a unit taking 10 tonnes of fresh product a day, at a yield of 14 : 1:
Illustrative figures calculated from the yield and campaign window above. They size a conversation; they do not describe any existing installation.
Fuel available in Burkina Faso
Burkina combines cashew shell (Cascades, Hauts-Bassins), abundant cotton stalk after the cotton campaign, and shea cake. Mango peel supplements during the mango campaign itself.
- Base load. Cashew shell · Cotton stalk · Shea cake and shell
- Supplement. Corn cob · Groundnut shell · Sesame stalk · Dried mango peel
See all 27 fuels and their properties
Market and buyer requirements
Domestic and regional, principally as dried tomato for the sauce and restaurant trade, and as a substitute for imported concentrate. This is an import-substitution product first and an export one only secondarily.
Explore further
The systems that hold this profile
Other crops in Burkina Faso
Mango · Shea · Raw cashew nut · Onion · Sesame
Tomato drying elsewhere
Frequently asked questions
How much fresh tomato does a tonne of dried require?
About fourteen tonnes. Tomato has the harshest ratio of any crop we handle, so intake logistics rather than chamber capacity is usually the binding constraint — a 10 t/day operation produces only around 700 kg of dried product a day.
Why dry tomato rather than make paste?
Paste needs a sterile filling and canning line and a cold chain for the product afterwards; dried tomato needs neither and is stable at ambient. For a unit handling a two-month January-to-February glut, drying at 55–62 °C is the far lower capital route into the same demand.
Does the dry-season timing help?
Considerably. The November-to-March window is the driest, coolest part of the Burkinabè year, so incoming air is already low in humidity and the chamber does less work across each 18 to 26 hour cycle — which matters on a crop removing roughly 13 kg of water per kilogram of product.
Size a unit in Burkina Faso
Tell us your daily fresh volume and target output, and we will size the chambers, the burner and the fuel available around your site.
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