Sheger Bread & Flour Factory, an industrial-scale bakery built by MIDROC's Horizon Plantations Plc, is set to start baking bread this week.

Built for 900 million Br within a 10-month period, the state-of-the-art bakery has the capacity to make 1.6 million loaves of bread a day and 80,000 an hour.

Horizon Plantations, a specialised arm of the MIDROC conglomerate, laid the cornerstone of the bakery on June 6, 2019, in the presence of Takele Uma, deputy mayor of the city. The construction began on August 11, 2019, and the workers have been working 12 to 14 hours a day.

The bakery, which uses automated machinery, will source flour from a plant that was built next to the bakery. Resting on 4.1ha, the bakery and the flour processing plant is located in Akaki Qality District. Horizon Plantations imported the machinery for the bread and flour from Italy, while the transformers were shipped in from China.

The bakery has four silos each with a storage capacity of 30,000ql of wheat, 12 ovens, 13 mixers, and two cooling towers capable of cooling 140,000 loaves of bread a minute. It has 357 permanent employees, 50 janitors, 47 chauffeurs and 23 food vans each capable of carrying 24,000 loaves of bread at once.

The flour factory can produce 2,224ql of flour a day, from which the bakery uses 1,200ql, and the excess 1,024ql of flour will go to the market, according to Abennet Gebremeskel, CEO of the project management office and general manager at MIDROC Construction Ethiopia.

The flour factory will source its wheat supply from Horizon Plantation's farm and other cooperative unions, as well as through import, according to Sisay Debebe, project manager of the Sheger Bread & Flour Factory.

The project was initiated by the Deputy Mayor, according to Feven Teshome, press secretary of the Addis Abeba City Administration Mayor's Office.

“Sheikh Mohammed Ali Al-Amoudi gladly accepted the proposal to realise the project,” Feven said. "The factory will alleviate the inflation in food prices and the shortage of bread in the capital."

The factory was initially expected to be finished in four to six months, but it took 10 months thanks to delays in machinery installation, according to Abennet.

The machinery installation experts could not come to Ethiopia because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the installation was undertaken by a number of professionals who were already in the country being directed by the foreign experts through Zoom video calls, according to Abennet.

“We were able to get foreign currency from Sheik Ali Al-Alamoudi, and it was very vital to the speedy completion of the project,” Abennet told Fortune.

The Addis Abeba City Administration and Sheger Bread & Flour Factory, an industrial-scale bakery built by MIDROC, agreed to sale the products at reasonable prices.

"We've yet to decide the price, but we'll supply consumers at a fair and affordable price," he said. "However, our bread will be priced far more affordably.”

The company has procured 150,000ql of wheat from Ukraine that will be used for three months of production. The first of six batches of the supply has reached the factory.

The plant consumes five megawatts of power during peak hours, according to Abraham Alemu, electrical engineer of the Factory.