The Lagos State government says its ambition is not to make the newly commissioned Lagos Fresh Food Hub, Agege, feel like a conventional food market, but to demonstrate what a modern food market can look like and a benchmark for food shopping facilities not only in Lagos or Nigeria, but across Africa.

The Commissioner for Agriculture and Food Systems, Ms Abisola Olusanya, who disclosed this during the commissioning of the hub, said the state hopes to ensure that customers have satisfaction from the quality and variety of produce to the organisation of the trading areas, seafood section, cold chain, storage, sanitation and the overall shopping experience.

Adesanya noted that Agege, Abijo, Mushin and the other hubs being developed across the state are therefore not isolated markets, but interconnected points within the same food distribution network.

She said: “The thinking behind these controlled hubs also goes beyond food distribution. We are trying to deal with some of the problems that have become almost inseparable from the way food is traditionally traded in a city of this size: the amount of food we lose because of poor handling and inadequate storage, the traffic congestion created when food trading and logistics compete for already limited road space, and the conditions under which many of our traders have had to conduct their businesses.

“By bringing these activities into properly designed spaces, we can manage waste better, organise loading and offloading, provide a cleaner and more dignified trading environment and begin to bring a largely informal food economy into a more organised and visible system without taking away the enterprise and commercial relationships that make our markets work.”

She stressed that the development of the framework has benefited considerably from partnership with Origin Tech Group, the project ideator and developer, working with the Lagos State Government to translate the Governor’s food systems vision into the physical infrastructure required to support aggregation, storage, logistics, wholesale and retail distribution.

“Mushin gave us our first opportunity to see the middle level hub operating in practice and subsequently demonstrated the versatility of having organised food infrastructure already in place. During the period of significant food inflation in 2024, it provided the platform from which we piloted the food subsidy intervention that eventually became the Ounje Eko Food Discount Market across 66 locations in Lagos.

“Today, Agege becomes another important node within this network. The infrastructure is only one part of what we are presenting today, because alongside it we have developed a 351-page operating framework that sets out how the hub will function.

“Produce will move into the hub through farmers, aggregators, processors, suppliers and bulk dealers, and from there through commissioned agents, retailers and institutional buyers to the consumer, with cold and dry storage providing the ability to preserve produce where immediate sale is neither necessary nor desirable,”Olusanya said.

She noted that around that flow, the state has established a governance framework covering operator selection, produce receiving and quality control, storage and inventory management, sanitation, waste management and the active use of trading spaces.

According to her, as produce moves through the hub, the same system will progressively give the state better visibility of what is coming in, where it is coming from, the volumes moving through the facility, what is being stored and where losses are occurring.

She added that the commercial relationships themselves remain in the hands of the traders, who will determine their prices, cash or credit terms and other commercial arrangements, while government and the hub management provide the infrastructure, operating rules and oversight required to keep the platform functioning efficiently.

“For each participant in that chain, the value is slightly different. For farmers and aggregators, it is access to a more organised and dependable market for produce; for bulk dealers, commissioned agents and retailers, it is the opportunity to trade within a facility with storage, better logistics and an established customer base; for logistics and cold-chain operators, it creates consistent demand around the movement and preservation of food; while for consumers, it brings a wider range of fresh food into one organised, cleaner and more convenient shopping environment.

“The benefit of the hub is therefore not concentrated at one end of the value chain, but comes from creating a platform in which each participant is able to do what they already do, but within a system that allows the entire chain to function better.

“The choice of Agege was deliberate. Few communities reflect the entrepreneurial energy of Lagos quite like Agege, and Pen Cinema has for generations been more than a junction; it has been a destination, a meeting point and a centre of commerce, making it an appropriate location for a facility built around the movement of food and trade,” the commissioner said.