Mwanza Aquatic Products Processing Plant.
Workers poured freshly purchased fish into wooden barrels and sent them to the workshop for the next stage of processing.
This was a factory built entirely on piled-up human labor, its main product being salted dried fish.
Salted dried fish could be preserved for a long time, was convenient to transport, and could even be carried as military rations.
In this era, when preservation technology was still immature, this was the only kind of traditional product East Africa could produce at its current level.
Canned food was somewhat feasible, but the cost was too high. Cans required metal, glass, and other materials as containers, and East Africa had no capacity to produce either of those. It could only be considered after the ironworks and glassworks were completed.
And that was only the first step. After all, even with the materials, there were still machines and other processes to consider.
In this era, any metal, even bones, was an important material and had to be recycled in many parts of Europe. East Africa could not possibly be so lavish as to provide immigrants with canned food.
Production required costs, collecting recyclable materials required costs, and after collection they still had to be disinfected or remelted and remade. It truly was not worth the trouble.
If they wanted profits, they still had to sell in Europe. But competition within Europe itself was already fierce, and canned food was not accepted by the public, being relatively popular only in the military.
The armies of every country had stable canned-food suppliers. Ernst could not currently force his way in unless a war caused military supplies to fall short of demand and the armies began purchasing on a large scale.
The main agricultural products currently sold by the Hohenzollern Conglomerate