Vegetable Marketing among Retailers in Kaduna South Local Government Area of Kaduna State, Nigeria

The study was conducted to examine the marketing of vegetables among retailers in Kaduna South Local Government Area of Kaduna State, Nigeria. Multi-stage, purposive and random sampling techniques were adopted to select the 100 vegetable retailers used for this study. Data for the study were collected from the retailers using questionnaire and personal interview. Data obtained from the study were subjected to analysis using simple descriptive statistics such as frequency table, percentage and charts. The result revealed that female (64%) dominated the marketing of vegetables in the study area with about 80% of the retailers in their active productive age of between 20 – 59 years of age, majority of the retailers are married (55%) and 83% of them had one form of education or the other and about 88% of the marketers had vegetable marketing experience of 6years and above. The study also revealed that there are three market channels for vegetable distribution which are; producers to wholesalers to retailers to consumers or producers to retailers to consumers or producers to consumers and fourteen vegetable crops were identified to be on sale in the study area with tomato (63%) being the highest crop on sales among the retailers while water leaf (6%) is the least. Opportunities derived from selling vegetables by the retailers include income generation (100%), as main occupation (67%), source of food (95%) and pleasure derivation (27%), however the business is faced with some challenges such as physical damage of vegetable on transportation (81%), high transportation cost (80%), lack of storage facility (65%), poor packaging system (53%), seasonality(49%) and limited supply (45%) of vegetables as well as low patronage (8%) . The study therefore recommends that marketers should be trained on simple preservation techniques, government intervention in the areas of provision of storage facilities, subsidy in transportation cost as well as provision of low interest rate credit facilities to the marketers in the study area to boost their marketing efficiency.