Edita’s first production line in Morocco will be up and running within days, IR director Menna Shams El Din confirmed to Enterprise yesterday. The line will produce 2.7k tons of HoHos cakes each year, she said.

The first of four production lines: The Moroccan factory, which has seen EGP 200 mn in investments to date, is Edita’s first greenfield project in the country and will eventually include four production lines, Shams El Din said. The factory is being run through Edita Morocco, the company’s 76%-owned JV with local distributor Dislog Group. There’s no word yet on what the other three lines will produce, how much the company will invest in them, or when they will start operations.

Moving in on a slice of Morocco’s cake market: With the dedicated HoHos line, Edita aims to capture a share of Morocco’s USD 100 mn cake market, Shams El Din said. The opening of the Moroccan line marks “a key step in delivering on the company’s regional growth strategy,” the company said in its latest earnings release.

Expanding bakery line: Edita raised last week the price of its Molto lineup in a bid to improve margins amid rising global commodity prices. A company official told us at the time that Edita’s bakery line is running at more than 100%, a development that has prompted the country’s leading snackfood player to “install an additional bakery line in 1Q2022 that will allow it to increase capacity by 20%,” the official said.

Upsized Twinkies are coming: Separately, Edita is expanding its cake segment with the launch of upsized Twinkies Cream, strawberry- and chocolate-flavored Twinkies, and chocolate- and vanilla-flavored Twinkies Icing products, according to an emailed statement (pdf). The new products, which will launch within the next couple of weeks, will retail at EGP 3 per pack. The product launch will come with a rebranding campaign for its Twinkies line “to consistently stimulate demand across its existing segments.”