How Tomato Jos Is Fixing Nigeria’s Tomato Paradox After Raising $18 Million

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In northern Nigeria, where vast fields of ripe tomatoes once rotted by the roadside during seasonal gluts, one company has spent more than a decade trying to turn waste into wealth.

Tomato Jos, founded in 2014 by Mira Mehta, has evolved from a modest farming experiment into a vertically integrated agribusiness that tackles one of the country’s most glaring agricultural contradictions: Nigeria produces about 65% of West Africa’s fresh tomatoes yet remains one of the world’s largest importers of tomato paste, spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on imports.

Mehta, who first encountered the problem while working in Nigeria in the late 2000s, saw farmers struggling with low yields, poor irrigation, limited market access, and massive post-harvest losses, often up to 60%. The solution, she believed, lay in building a reliable end-to-end supply chain: better farming practices, consistent off-take at fair prices, and local processing into high-quality tomato paste.

The journey began small. After placing second in a Harvard Business School social enterprise competition, Mehta received a $25,000 prize. She supplemented it with a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $55,000. Those early funds helped launch operations in Nasarawa State before the company relocated to Kaduna State in 2017 for better scale.

Over the years, Tomato Jos has raised more than $18 million in total funding. Key milestones include a €3.9 million round in 2020 to finance irrigation systems and the construction of a modern tomato paste processing plant, and a $12.2 million raise in 2024, reportedly the largest funding round by a female-led startup in Africa that year.

Today, the company operates its own irrigated farmland and works closely with smallholder farmers. It provides them with high-quality seeds, inputs, drip irrigation technology, training, and crucially guaranteed purchase agreements at predictable prices. The result has been dramatic: while the national average tomato yield hovers around 5 tons per hectare, Tomato Jos-supported farmers achieve yields up to 10 times higher, sometimes reaching 40–60 tons per hectare under optimized conditions.

The human impact runs deeper than yields. Tomato Jos has supported over 10,000 smallholder farmers since inception; with many thousands more having passed through its programs. A significant portion around 60% are women, a deliberate focus in a region where female farmers often face barriers to land access and resources. Income gains for participating farmers can reach five to six times what they earned previously, enabling investments in land, education, housing improvements, and small side businesses.

The company’s solar-powered processing facility in Kaduna now produces tomato paste for the domestic market, helping reduce reliance on imported products that are sometimes of lower quality. By creating a stable market and cutting post-harvest waste, Tomato Jos aims to strengthen local food security while building a commercially viable business.

Mehta, who holds degrees from Brown University and Harvard Business School, has described the model as a for-profit social enterprise from the start. Farmers receive not just technical support but also access to finance through inputs supplied on credit, repaid at harvest. The closed-loop approach benefits both sides: the company secures consistent, high-quality raw material, while farmers move from subsistence-level uncertainty to more predictable commercial farming.

Challenges have been plentiful. Operating in northern Nigeria has meant navigating security issues, infrastructure gaps, currency volatility, and the complexities of scaling industrial processing in an emerging market. The COVID-19 pandemic hit just as the company was breaking ground on its factory in early 2020, testing resilience early on.

Yet Tomato Jos has persisted, gradually expanding its irrigated land, now targeting hundreds of hectares and deepening partnerships with smallholders. At full ambition, the company envisions working across thousands of hectares and supporting even larger numbers of farmers while capturing a meaningful share of Nigeria’s tomato paste market.

In a sector long dominated by informal trading and import dependence, Tomato Jos represents a different bet: that patient capital, modern agronomy, and inclusive supply chains can make local production competitive. Its progress offers a case study in how agribusiness can simultaneously chase profit and deliver measurable social returns raising farmer incomes, empowering women, creating jobs, and contributing to domestic food self-sufficiency.

As Nigeria continues to grapple with food security, inflation, and the high cost of imports, stories like Tomato Jos highlight both the potential and the persistence required to rewrite entrenched value chains. From a $25,000 prize to over $18 million in backing and a growing network of empowered farmers, the company’s trajectory shows what becomes possible when vision meets execution in one of Africa’s most challenging, yet opportunity-rich agricultural landscapes.