Sachet water, known as pure water, in Nigeria is one of the booming business in the northern part of Nigeria where hot weather is prompting people into drinking more water than usual and lack of clean pump water contributed in giving the business a good push up.

The time of hawking groundnut had past, this is the time of sachet water because it provides a good income as far as you can see it and buy. “The gain on pure water is 100%,” said a seller in Dutse Jigawa State. “We buy it 50 Naira per a bag of 24 pieces and sell 5Naira for one piece.”  According to the seller, she can sell 5 bags in a day.

At this hot weather, some seller s complained that they can not buy enough to satisfy their customers with some sellers saying orders they placed two days ago have not been delivered by producers.

Some producers Marketplace News visited confirmed that they could not meet up with demand of their customers now because water from their boll holes (source of the water for their production) has gone down.

“We have the capacity of producing 6000 bags a day but the level of water in our boll holes has gone down, therefore we could only produce 4000 bags a day,” said a Manager of Sharmer Enterprises, a company that produces sachet water in Jigawa State. “We are receiving more orders than we used to receive and could not satisfy all of them in three days.” The source said they own orders as old as four days but they are working day and night to make sure there is water for everybody to drink.

According to the source, distribution is the problem they have and everybody wants to buy direct from them even those that buy as small as two bags and they have only four trunks distributing the water inside the city and within. The source added that with the help of their three automatic sealing machines, they have increased production by 100% compared to the time they were using manual and they employed more than 20 people.

Before NAFDEC came and cleaned up production of sachet water, many people were in the business of producing it even in their back yard with water nobody could account for its source. Now 50% of sachet water is as pure as the name sounds in Nigeria (pure water) and we hope they will continue to improve the quality to meet up with bottle water because it is helping many poor Nigerians living in the area where clean drinking water is a big problem.

Marketplace thinks people should invest more in the production of sachet water to help purify it and of course make money out of bullishness of the market.