Harvesting a future for mangoes and their African growers

It was at the height of the mango season in west Kenya that Phil Hughes saw a way to bend the future.

He was a Peace Corps volunteer at the time, 10 years ago. And the mangoes were, well, awesome - creamily lush and sweet, a variety called Ngowe, indigenous to Zanzibar, reddish-yellow.

They were beautiful things.

Hughes is not an animated speaker. But over a salad at the Reading Terminal Market one recent afternoon, he was getting worked up recalling his days in Africa.

"Most of the year you can't get mangoes. Ever. You can't get them in August," he says. "You can't get them in September. Or October."

"Then all of a sudden, on January 1, there are a million mangoes!"

Women with bowls of them rush local minibuses called matatoos as they roll to a stop, pressing them to the windows.

Their price plummets; they bring a pittance at the public markets.

They end up rotting by the side of the road.

"The supply-demand curve is way off," he says.

That is when the idea for a realignment came to him: Why not cut and dry mango strips (and maybe as well the bananas and pineapples that villagers toted on the back of their bicycles) and package them as healthy snacks?

It was not a poetic moment. It was a matter of math: "My idea was if you had 10 mango trees and if 'x' is the amount they can get at [fresh] market rate, they're only getting 0.25x. Dry them for snacks, you can sell them year-round. You could get 100 percent."

Then in 2005, Phil Hughes came home to East Falls and, for a time, forgot about the whole thing.

What would become his line of dried fruit, Mavuno Harvest (Mavuno, meaning harvest in Swahili), would have to wait.

The challenges of importing from Africa, of packaging (at first in an FDA-certified room in his home), of making contacts and winning accounts would come later.

It would turn out, even, that west Kenya was not the most fruitful place for his venture. It would be with a co-op of 150 small farmers in neighboring Uganda.

In the export world, Kenya was coffee country. Uganda, organic fruit.

Hughes' first sale was last May - 36 three-ounce bags ($5.99) of organic, fair-trade (30 percent over market price), gluten-free, no-added-sugar, no-preservatives dried fruit to the Swarthmore Co-op.

It is dried fruit with some difference: The bananas, for instance, aren't the usual sweetened banana chips. They're elongated strips of tiny "apple bananas," naturally sweet, chewy, and moist.

The fruit is not grown on industrial farms. It is cultivated by family farmers in the volcanic soils of the Great Rift Valley, wellspring of the White Nile and Lake Victoria, nurtured by tropical rains and sun: "It tastes good, is good for you," says Hughes, "and does some good in the world."

Each week he has added new customers: the Whole Foods in Malvern has a display rack the size of a garage door. He is in five other local Whole Foods. And in Weaver's Way in Chestnut Hill, and Mariposa in West Philadelphia, and in a sprinkling of health-food stores (most of which he found in Google searches) in Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas. Seattle, go figure, is big.

This month he sold 3,000 bags, a hundredfold increase.

(From $100 in monthly sales a year ago, this April's sales alone are projected at $10,000. Total sales for Year One? $35,000).

At this pace, says Hughes (hopes Hughes?), Mavuno could go national - not only as a sustainable business, but as a reliable cash stream for the co-op of small farmers in Uganda.

But Phil Hughes' detour would first take him in other directions.

He would get a graduate degree in international business at Temple University. He worked at Tastykake's plant at the Navy Yard, overseeing the tool inventory. ("Really boring!").

His Peace Corps work had focused on public health, AIDS prevention, and water sanitation.

So in 2011, he and his father mulled his next move on a flight to watch the Phillies' spring training in Florida: Go back to Africa? Or go back to school to be a doctor?

He enrolled in a premed program at Penn.

Six weeks later, he realized he wasn't cut out for medical school.

It would be back to Africa.

In my notebook, Phil Hughes is sketching a crude outline of Uganda.

It is a Tuesday morning, earlier this month, and he is offering samples in an aisle at the Whole Foods in Devon.

So what he is drawing and what he is saying takes on an extra layer of otherworldliness, another dimension of exotica: in the Main Line suburbs of Devon, Uganda is about as terra incognita as it gets.

He labels Entebbe to the south, the airport that was the scene of the legendary Israeli commando rescue. To the far north are the thickets hiding Joseph Kony, the outlaw leader of the remnants of the Lord's Resistance Army. Wars lap against its borders.

But the stretch of Uganda where Hughes found his farmers is stable today, the boot of Idi Amin long lifted, its reputation as the continent's most lovely garden spot re-flowering.

The mangoes and bananas and pineapples are grown on small, two- or three-acre subsistence corn farms about an hour north of the capital of Kampala, usually as a cash crop (rosemary is another local specialty).

In photographs, you can see fruit mounded on the back of three-speed bikes headed for the co-op. You can see women working in the lush, equatorial fields. And slicing the fruit, readying it for the drying ovens.

In the Whole Foods produce aisle in Devon, cartons of fresh Mexican mangoes are on special, stacked waist-high.

"Muchos! Mangoes!" cry the banners.

But when they are gone, Phil Hughes' dried mangoes will be hanging on.

They have an 18-month shelf life.

Also known as a future.