Source: European Investment Bank
When two entrepreneurial brothers, Khalid and Amine Bennani, started a business to export Moroccan products, they quickly realised they needed to adopt more processing steps to increase sales and profit.
For example, rather than just selling plants and seeds like rosemary and thyme, the brothers invested in technologies to extract essential oils and active plant ingredients, and then sell the extracts globally at a higher price. They developed state-of-the-art processing facilities at their company, Santis, and created hundreds of jobs in rural areas, initially focusing on natural ingredients for the cosmetics and nutraceutical industries.
In 2021, Santis received a loan worth about €4.7 million from CIH Bank in Morocco to expand its business, especially the production of carob, whose gum is used in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and food products. The European Investment Bank signed a €60 million loan with CIH Bank in 2021 to help businesses hurt by the global health crisis.
“We had neither the expertise nor the resources initially to carry out our plans for the carob market, but we had an idea to create more value from this product and this matched the company’s philosophy perfectly,” says Othman Bennani, Santis’s business development manager. “These EIB funds were pivotal to the success of our entire venture around the carob.”