Before sunrise each day, long lines of trucks begin their journey into Lagos carrying tomatoes from the North, grains from the Middle Belt, onions from farmlands hundreds of kilometres away and frozen products moving through fragile cold chains under punishing heat.
By the time the city fully wakes, millions of residents are already dependent on a supply system stretched beyond comfort.
For years, that system has battled familiar problems like damaged roads, rising transport costs, weak storage infrastructure and devastating post-harvest losses that sometimes inflate the cost of food long before it reaches market stalls.
Now, Lagos is preparing a response on a scale rarely seen in Africa’s food logistics sector.
In Ketu-Ereyun, Epe, work is advancing on what the Lagos State Government describes as Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest food logistics hub, a sprawling facility designed to reshape how food enters, moves through and is distributed across Nigeria’s commercial capital.
The first phase of the Lagos Central Food Systems and Logistics Hub is expected to be commissioned this year, according to the Commissioner for Agriculture and Food Systems, Abisola Olusanya, who unveiled details of the project during the 2026 Ministerial Press Briefing in Alausa.
Lagos is simultaneously activating a ₦500 billion Offtake Guarantee Fund under its Produce for Lagos initiative, a financial mechanism intended to reduce investment risks across the agricultural chain while guaranteeing market access for producers, processors, aggregators and logistics operators.
Together, both projects reveal a city attempting to solve food insecurity not through short-term market reactions, but through infrastructure, coordination and scale.
The Epe hub is projected to accommodate more than 1,500 trucks daily and process over 1.5 million metric tonnes of food annually. Plans for the facility include cold and dry storage systems, aggregation centres, quality control laboratories, processing and repackaging facilities, digital trading platforms and large-scale warehousing infrastructure.
For Lagos, a state with an estimated annual food economy valued at ₦16.14 trillion, the pressure to modernise food movement has become increasingly urgent.
Officials believe the project could significantly reduce waste, improve aggregation and lower distribution costs across the supply chain. Beyond food distribution, the development is also expected to create jobs across transportation, warehousing, retail, food safety systems, packaging, processing and technology services.
Yet perhaps the most consequential aspect of the initiative lies in what it signals. For decades, Nigeria’s agricultural conversation has revolved largely around production. Lagos appears to be placing equal attention on what happens after harvest, the movement, preservation, financing and reliability of food systems that ultimately determine affordability for consumers.
“When food supply is predictable, logistics are efficient and market systems are structured, prices become less volatile,” Olusanya said.
The state says it is also strengthening partnerships with food-producing states, transporters, market operators and private investors as part of effort to create a more coordinated supply network into Lagos.
In a city where demand never slows and population pressure continues to intensify, the stakes are enormous because in Lagos, food is not merely commerce, it is stability, survival and the invisible engine behind one of Africa’s largest urban economies.
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