Why do the people who grow food benefit the least from it?
Growing up where Value left the Village
Our founder, an indigenous food scientist, grew up in Teso, a peanut-growing community where farming demanded relentless effort but delivered uncertain income. Harvest season brought hard work, but rarely prosperity. Farmers sold their crops cheaply to middlemen. Processing happened far from the village. Value disappeared before it ever returned to the people who produced it. The pattern was impossible to ignore: the communities feeding the nation were not thriving.That contradiction shaped everything that followed. With over a decade of experience in community development and food innovation, Irene committed her career to redesigning the system.Building infrastructure that allows farming communities to capture the value of what they grow.
The Problem was bigger than Farming
Our founder’s education in Food Science and Technology, combined with her work as a volunteer on livelihoods and resilience projects within rural communities, revealed a deeper truth. The challenge was not farmer productivity.It was infrastructure.
Centralized processing concentrated profits in cities while rural communities absorbed the risks without capturing value. No amount of training or yield improvement could fix a system that structurally removed opportunity from the very people producing the food. The solution required shifting where value is created, bringing processing back into the communities where crops are grown.
Bring the Factory to the Farm
The breakthrough idea was simple
If processing stays local, prosperity stays local.
Building the First Units
Our work is currently focused on testing whether local processing could operate reliably.
Our first unit is proving something important:
Communities can run high-quality food infrastructure when given the tools and training. Farmers can earn more. Jobs can be created locally. Food safety can improve
The model is working
Infrastructure as a Promise
MAMLO was created to turn a working idea into a permanent system. The goal was never a single factory but a network.
A distributed architecture that multiplies opportunity every time a new unit is deployed. Micro-factories became the foundation for a new kind of rural economy, one built on ownership, coordination, and measurable impact.
Beyond one crop
Peanuts are the beginning.
The real mission is a platform for rural industrialization.
Micro-factories can process many crops.
Strengthen many regions.
Empower millions of households.
The system is designed to expand beyond a single product into a scalable infrastructure model for food economies.
