The Moroccan chocolate market is increasingly attracting new players.
After the Holmarcom group which launched into the production of chocolate with its T’Choco brand through a new subsidiary Biscoland, another agribusiness giant decides to invest in this market until recently dominated by foreign brands ( European and Turkish) particularly in its premium segment and products based on pure cocoa (Vs vegecao and other chocolate derivatives).
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This is the Zine Group known for its Alitkane brand (couscous, pasta, semolina and flour) which is preparing to launch, in turn, a new chocolate manufacturing unit in the Casablanca region. For the moment, nothing filters on the positioning of this project nor on the amount that the group founded by Noureddine Zine at the beginning of the 90s of the last century plans to invest in this new adventure.
If we add to these two initiatives by Holmarcom and the Zine Group, the arrival of the new player Next Snacking Industry which inaugurated a few months ago the largest sweet snacking unit in Morocco with products essentially based on chocolate and under the Nooco brand which has since created a buzz, several hundred million dirhams would have been drained towards the chocolate market in Morocco.
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Is this synonymous, therefore, with overproduction in a market estimated “barely” at nearly a billion dirhams per year? Difficult to say, especially since the products newly introduced to the Moroccan market, including Nooco in particular, rather attack imported products (Snickers, LU, Lindt, etc.) but also because this market can only increase with average consumption per inhabitant of less than a kilogram of chocolate annually compared to 3 kilograms in neighboring Tunisia and between 7 to 8 kilograms in Europe.
Remember that the Zine Group achieves a consolidated turnover of 4.5 billion dirhams through around twenty subsidiaries operating in the fields of pasta, couscous, fertilizers, cereals, livestock feed, tea and sugar.
