Niels Østerberg is an investor with a penchant for finding risky, challenging ventures, the kind that go into territory other investors shy away from, the kind who looks at rubble and wants to turn it into something beautiful.
From bananas in Kenya to pineapples in Uganda, from guavas in Vietnam to oranges in Egypt, there’s not a value chain that Niels did not seek to transform, and not a venture he did not seek to make better.
When Niels joined Orana in 1978 as an impressionable intern, he had one goal in mind: to test whether his capstone apple-juice press worked. He was soon under Dagmar Andersen’s wings, who not only inspired him but also shaped his world view.
Orana has grown from a small company in Rynkeby, Denmark, to a company truly integrated in global value chains, upholding responsible business conduct everywhere it operates.
“Dagmar was a true visionary, well ahead of her time, and spoke about sustainability before sustainability became a thing. She is the drive through which Orana’s innovative spirit runs.”
Dagmar is the inspiration behind Orana’s values: quality by nature, staying curious, and staying authentic.
Niels’s short rendezvous as an intern led to a 48-year trailblazing career at the company. In 1999, he exercised a management buyout and subsequently assumed the role of managing director.
In this new phase, Niels had one big ambition: a desire to grow the business beyond Rynkeby and Denmark. Orana established its first international operation in 2002 in Vietnam, followed by Egypt in 2007 and Kenya in 2014. Growing internationally was not a spur-of-the-moment decision, but one deeply rooted in strategy.
“Internationalisation is our way of spreading risk. Decentralised production means we can continue operating in different places at all times, in a world rife with geo-political risk,” says Niels. “Our strategy prioritises locating production facilities close to raw materials and customers, enabling business expansion, risk diversification, and flexibility through small, scalable factories.”
This strategy would inevitably lead Orana into an Africa foray, which, although challenging, also brings the biggest joys, where fruit is plentiful and processors are few, and where experts estimate between 30% and 40% post-harvest losses in horticulture.
In 2017, Orana established Moonberg Organic Farms Limited, an ambitious project “in the middle of nowhere,” as Niels quips. The goal was simple: grow bananas on a big nucleus farm, support smallholder outgrower farmers to augment production, process the fruit, and send it to Europe, a processing facility with backward integration to primary producers.
With the support of the Danish Government’s blended-finance instrument, the Danida Market Development Partnerships programme (DMDP), and the Micro Enterprise Support Programme Trust (MESPT), Moonberg worked with 1,500 smallholder farmers to plant 274,000 tissue-culture bananas. This was the easy part.
Navigating infrastructural and systemic challenges was harder: convincing the county government to repair the roads to the nucleus farm for outgrower farmers, finding fit-for-purpose water-storage solutions in a county where flash floods and long droughts both occur, and finding the right business partners.
“In all the years, I have come to realise that you cannot make a good deal with a bad person, and I have had my share of bad deals with bad people all over the world.”
Just as there are bad people around the world, there are good people too, as is the case with Orana’s second venture in East Africa: Oranagate Limited, a joint venture between Orana and Uganda’s industrial development company, Southgate Properties Limited.
The USD 6 million investment opened in May 2026. With a processing capacity of 5 metric tons of fruit per hour, the facility aims to transform Uganda’s agricultural value chain, reduce post-harvest losses and boost farmers’ incomes.
Orana and Southgate are a perfect match. Richard Munyaneza, Southgate’s managing director, had a vision to diversify his business from industrial real estate into agro-processing. All the ingredients were there: the investor, the fruit, and the initial investment to purchase industrial equipment. Save for one, the deep technical knowledge that would turn those resources into value. That is how Orana came in.
“When we first came to see the Southgate facility, my first thought was, this place would never get a HACCP certification. We have worked with the Southgate team to design a processing line that would meet global food-safety standards, and it should begin production in a month,” Niels says.
Though Orana’s growth as a truly global company is a story of grit and persistence, the company has also benefited from three things:
- Financial instruments such as the DMDP and Impact Fund Denmark, which have de-risked entry into otherwise risky markets.
- Supportive institutional partners, such as DI – Dansk Industri in Denmark, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and partners with deep local knowledge like the Micro Enterprise Support Programme Trust (MESPT).
- An enabling domestic policy environment that offers incentives for international investors, such as Uganda’s Uganda Development Bank and the State House Investors Protection Unit (SHIPU).
Based on a conversation with DI East Africa.