The first company went bust. That is the part of the Fan Milk story most Ghanaians never hear. The bicycle bells that ring through every Accra neighbourhood at midday belong to a business that lost its entire equity within two years of starting.
A Dane in Accra
Erik Emborg was a Danish businessman who came to the Gold Coast in the late colonial years. According to the company’s own history, he partnered with investors to set up Ghana Cold Store in December 1959. In 1960, the Ghana Milk Company Limited was inaugurated with eight shareholders. The idea was to produce dairy products in a tropical country where fresh milk was scarce and refrigeration was rare.
Bankruptcy in 1962
The Ghana Milk Company lost its entire equity and went bankrupt in 1962. Emborg offered to buy out the other shareholders and take over the bank loan. The company was reorganised under a new name, Fan Milk Limited, and widened its range to ice cream, yoghurt and ice lollies.
Selling from bicycles
Fan Milk’s real invention was its distribution. Instead of relying on shops with freezers, which few had, the company sold through independent vendors who collected cold products from depots and pushed them through the streets on carts and bicycles fitted with insulated boxes. A 2013 trade report put the network at more than 30,000 street vendors across West Africa.
For many young men, a Fan Milk bicycle has been a first job. Vendors buy stock at a discount and earn on what they sell, so a hot day in Accra is a good day’s wages.
FanIce, FanYogo, FanChoco
Generations of Ghanaian children grew up on the sachets: FanIce in vanilla and strawberry, FanYogo, FanChoco and FanDango. The products are cheap, sold frozen and eaten on the spot, often by schoolchildren at closing time. The brand names became so common that “Fan Milk” is used for frozen sachet treats in general.
A public company
Fan Milk became a public limited company in the late 1960s and was listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange in 1991, one of the earliest companies on the young exchange. For decades it was a staple of Ghanaian investors’ portfolios.
Danone takes over
The French food group Danone bought into Fan Milk in 2013 alongside the private equity firm Abraaj. After Abraaj’s collapse, Danone increased its stake to 100 percent in July 2019.
The bell still rings
Supermarkets, malls and imported ice cream brands have changed Accra’s market since Fan Milk began. The vendors on bicycles still outsell most of them where it counts: at a trotro stop in the afternoon heat, a school gate at three o’clock or a football pitch in Nima. Emborg’s company survived its own bankruptcy by going to customers instead of waiting for them, and that is still how it sells.
