Value Addition For Tomatoes: Making Tomato Paste And Sauce
On a hot March afternoon in Mutoko, the roadside is red with tomatoes. Buckets overflow, prices collapse, and farmers quietly watch their hard work turn soft in the sun. A few kilometres away, another farmer stands in a small kitchen, stirring a bubbling pot of tomato paste, lining up clean jars on a table. In six months’ time, when tomatoes are scarce and prices soar, she’ll still be selling.
Tomatoes are among the most perishable crops grown by Zimbabwean smallholder farmers. At peak harvest, prices can drop below the cost of transport. Yet the same fruit, turned into paste or bottled sauce, can last 12–18 months and sell for three to five times more per kilogram than fresh tomatoes at glut time.
Here’s the good news: small-scale tomato processing is genuinely possible with basic tools — a clean kitchen, a hot stove, and glass jars.
Why Turn Fresh Tomatoes Into Paste Or Sauce?
Processing tomatoes adds time and value:
- Longer shelf life: Properly processed paste or sauce keeps for 12–18 months in a cool, dark place.
- Higher price: Tomato paste and sauce often fetch three to five times the fresh price during the main harvest period.
- Less waste: Surplus or cheap glut tomatoes become a storable product instead of rotting in the field.
FFA Explainer:
Value addition means changing a raw product into a more valuable form — like turning fresh tomatoes into paste, sauce, or dried pieces. For smallholders, value addition can turn price crashes into business opportunities, especially for women and youth working from home kitchens.
How Do You Make Tomato Paste At Smallholder Scale?
Tomato paste is simply concentrated tomato: water removed, flavour intensified.
Step-by-step process:
- Select and wash: Choose ripe, unblemished tomatoes. Discard any mouldy or badly split fruit. Wash thoroughly in clean water.
- Cook until soft: Roughly chop the tomatoes and place them in a large pot. Cook over medium heat for 20–30 minutes until completely soft and juicy.
- Remove skins and seeds: Pass the cooked tomatoes through a metal sieve or hand-cranked tomato mill to separate the skins and seeds from the pulp.
- Concentrate the pulp: Return the smooth liquid to the pot. Cook on low heat for 2–3 hours, stirring often, until the volume has reduced by about 70–80%. The paste should be thick and glossy.
- Add natural preservatives: For every litre of finished paste, add about 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 tablespoon of vinegar. Stir well.
- Sterilise jars: Wash glass jars and lids, then sterilise them by either heating in an oven at about 120°C for 20 minutes or boiling in water for 10 minutes.
- Fill and seal: While the paste is still boiling hot, ladle it into the hot, sterilised jars, leaving a small headspace. Seal immediately and turn jars upside down (lid down) as they cool to help create a vacuum seal.
Correctly processed and sealed tomato paste can be stored for 12–18 months in a cool, dark place without refrigeration — ideal for households in areas with limited electricity.
How Do You Make A Simple Spiced Tomato Sauce?
Spiced tomato sauce is a higher-value product than plain paste, with strong demand from households, tuck shops, and small eateries.
Basic sauce recipe (about 2 kg tomatoes):
- 2 kg ripe tomatoes.
- 1 medium onion, finely chopped.
- 2–3 garlic cloves.
- 1 tablespoon sugar.
- 1 teaspoon salt.
- ½ teaspoon each of coriander, black pepper, and chilli (adjust to taste).
- ¼ cup vinegar.
Method:
- Cook the chopped tomatoes, onion, and garlic together until everything is very soft.
- Blend or mash until smooth, then pass through a sieve to remove any remaining skins or seeds.
- Return the smooth mixture to the pot. Add the spices, sugar, salt, and vinegar.
- Cook on low heat, stirring regularly, until the sauce thickens to your preferred consistency.
- Bottle the sauce while still hot into sterilised bottles or jars and seal immediately.
A 500 ml bottle of well-packaged, consistently flavoured tomato sauce can sell for about US$1.50–3.00 in local markets and tuck shops — compared to fresh tomatoes at US$0.30–0.50 per kg during harvest gluts.
What Equipment Do You Need?
Most of the equipment is already found in many rural and urban homes.
Basic equipment list:
- Large cooking pot (10–20 litre capacity) for boiling and reducing tomatoes.
- Metal sieve or hand tomato mill (often available for US$5–15 in hardware shops).
- Clean glass jars or bottles with tight lids — many farmers collect and reuse jam or mayonnaise jars.
- Labels: handwritten labels on paper or stickers are enough for local markets; printed labels give a more professional look.
In districts like Marondera and Gweru, women’s groups are already pooling equipment — one big pot, shared sieves, and a simple gas or wood stove — to process tomatoes together during peak season.
What Does The Business Case Look Like?
Processing tomatoes into paste or sauce doesn’t just prevent waste; it can generate solid profit.
Example: turning 20 kg of surplus tomatoes into paste
- Buy or value 20 kg of surplus tomatoes at US$0.20/kg during a glut: total cost = US$4.00.
- Process into paste: yield is about 2 kg of thick paste.
- Pack into 8–10 jars of 250 g each.
- Sell each jar at about US$1.00: revenue = US$8.00–10.00.
- Deduct fuel and packaging costs (roughly US$1.50).
- Net margin: about US$2.50–4.50 for this batch.
Repeat this weekly or whenever prices crash, and the numbers quickly become meaningful — especially for youth and women looking to build small, home-based agribusinesses that support families year-round.
Turning Gluts Into Opportunity
Zimbabwe’s push for value addition under National Development Strategy 1 is not only about big factories and export lines. It starts in small village kitchens and township backyards, where farmers take control of their surplus and their prices.
For the Mutoko farmer watching tomatoes rot at the roadside, the choice is stark. Sell today for almost nothing, or learn to turn that red flood into jars and bottles that will still be earning in next year’s dry season. One pot, a sieve, some jars — and a little heat — can transform a fragile crop into a long-lasting business.
Article prepared by FFA Research Team | Farm Future Africa | farmfutureafrica.co.zw
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