The missing middle: why aggregation decides who profits from potatoes

In African potato value chains, the question of who profits is decided less on the farm than in the gap between the farm and the market. Most growers are smallholders selling small, scattered lots, and few formal aggregators exist at the "first mile" to gather that produce, grade it and connect it to buyers. Into that vacuum step brokers — and the margins move with them.

The cost of the missing middle is enormous. Across sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 30 to 40% of horticultural produce never reaches market, lost to informal, unreliable supply chains. Where it does sell, intermediaries capture much of the value: in Morocco's growing zones the farmgate price of potatoes roughly doubles on the way to the consumer, with traders' margins blamed for the gap. And without storage, farmers face a forced choice — sell everything at harvest when prices are lowest, or watch a perishable crop rot.

A new class of aggregators is trying to rewrite that arithmetic. In Kenya, SokoFresh pairs solar-powered cold storage with first-mile aggregation and market linkage, offering smallholders a farm-to-market service rather than just a cold box; in interviews with 200 of its customers, most reported improved livelihoods. Earlier platforms such as Twiga Foods built digital links between farmers and urban vendors to strip out layers of middlemen. In Rwanda, cooperatives run collection centres — though they struggle when members sell privately on the side.

The thread running through them is that aggregation is not a logistics afterthought but the hinge of the whole chain. Clean seed and good agronomy decide how much a farmer grows; aggregation, storage and market linkage decide how much of that a farmer actually gets paid for. Processors hunting for reliable, graded volume need it as much as farmers do.

The missing middle is slowly being filled — by cooperatives, digital platforms and solar cold-chain startups. Whoever builds it will capture, or redistribute, the value that currently leaks out of Africa's potato trade somewhere between the field and the fork.