Most cassava flour brands you'll find in the US or Europe are buyer-resellers. The bag changes labels several times between the farm and your kitchen — through a broker, an importer, a co-packer. By the time you hold it, the flour has passed through five or six hands and no one in the chain owned the harvest.

YAKÉVA works differently. We grow the cassava ourselves. We mill it ourselves. The farm and the factory sit on the same site in Cameroon. That structure isn't a marketing line — it's the only reason we can promise a 24-hour window from harvest to milled flour, and it's the reason every bag carries the same single origin.

We grow our own cassava

YAKÉVA is a brand of JK Agrofarms, the parent company that owns both the farm and the processing facility. We don't source from cooperatives, smallholder partners, or commodity exporters. Every gram of cassava in every bag of YAKÉVA flour came out of the ground on our farm and walked the few hundred meters to our factory next door.

That vertical integration is rare in this category. It means we choose the cassava varieties we plant, we set the harvest schedule, we own the timing between pulling the root and starting the process, and we own every step in between.

The 24-hour fresh-process window

Cassava root is perishable in a way that wheat or corn is not. Once it leaves the ground, the starches inside the root begin to deteriorate. Industry research uses the term "post-harvest physiological deterioration" — the visible darkening you see in days-old cassava is the chemistry of that process. The longer the root waits between harvest and processing, the worse the flour that comes out the other end.

Commodity cassava flour can sit for days or weeks before processing begins. The roots travel from smallholder farms to collection points, from collection points to brokers, from brokers to a processing facility that might be hundreds of kilometers away. By the time milling starts, the starch profile has shifted.

Because our factory sits on the farm, our window is twenty-four hours. The roots come out of the soil in the morning and go onto the processing line that same day.

Six mechanical steps — from harvest to milled flour

Every bag of YAKÉVA flour comes from the same six-step process, in the same order, on the same equipment. No chemicals enter the line at any point. The drying is mechanical, not solar. Nothing is added, nothing is bleached, nothing is extracted out.

1. Washing

Roots come off the harvest carts and into industrial washers. The goal is the same as any food-grade wash — remove soil and field debris before the cassava enters the food-contact stages of the line.

2. Peeling

The brown outer bark of the cassava root is mechanically removed. This is the step that separates whole-root processing from starch extraction — we keep the white tuber intact for milling, rather than reducing it to its starch fraction.

3. Grating

Peeled roots are grated into a coarse pulp. This is what makes the next step possible: the surface area of the grated pulp is what allows even, efficient dewatering.

4. Pressing

The grated pulp is mechanically pressed to remove water. Cassava root is roughly 60% water by weight when fresh, so this step is where most of that water leaves the line. No chemicals are used — the water comes out under physical pressure alone.

5. Drying

The pressed pulp is dried mechanically to bring it to a stable, shelf-safe moisture content. We don't sun-dry. The mechanical drying is consistent, fast, and isolated from contamination — the kind of variability you get with open-air drying isn't compatible with the consistency we need batch to batch.

6. Milling

The dried cassava is milled into the fine, neutral flour that goes into our bags. The milling is industrial mechanical, on equipment we own and operate inside our own facility.

Single-crop facility — what it does and doesn't mean

Our factory only processes cassava. Our farm only grows cassava. There is no wheat, no rye, no barley, no oats, no spelt, no other grain growing on the land or moving through the equipment.

This matters most for households cooking gluten-free. The standard concern with any flour milled in a multi-crop facility is cross-contamination — gluten residue on shared equipment, or grain dust in the air between runs. We don't have that exposure because we don't have that equipment and we don't have that grain.

Organic — NOP and EU certified, via Ecocert

YAKÉVA's cassava and the resulting flour are certified organic to both USDA NOP (the US National Organic Program) and the EU organic standard. The certification body is Ecocert, and we've held it since 2023.

What that certification actually checks is the input side of the farm: no synthetic fertilizers, no prohibited pesticides, no genetically modified planting material, and a documented audit trail showing what went into the soil for the years before the certification was issued. It also covers the processing side: no prohibited additives, no irradiation, no synthetic processing aids.

In a category where "natural" and "clean" are unregulated marketing words, the NOP + EU dual certification is the meaningful version of the same claim — and it's been independently audited every year since 2023.

What this looks like next to the alternatives

What it changes	YAKÉVA	Most cassava flour brands
Who owns the farm	We do (JK Agrofarms)	Third-party smallholder networks
Who owns the mill	We do (same site as the farm)	Buyer-resellers or co-packers
Time from harvest to milling	≤ 24 hours	Days to weeks
Drying method	Mechanical (no sun-drying)	Often sun-dried
Facility type	Single-crop (cassava only)	Often multi-crop
Organic certification	NOP + EU (Ecocert, since 2023)	Varies; often none

Frequently asked questions

Where in Cameroon is the farm?
The farm and factory are in Cameroon, on a single site that we own and operate as JK Agrofarms. We'll share more on the specific location as the brand's public story develops.

Are you certified organic?
Yes — NOP (USDA National Organic Program) and EU organic, certified by Ecocert since 2023. Both certifications are audited annually.

Is YAKÉVA cassava flour certified gluten-free?
No, we don't carry a third-party gluten-free certification mark. What we can say is that our facility only processes cassava and our farm only grows cassava — there's no gluten in the supply chain, so there's no cross-contamination pathway. Households managing celiac disease should make their own decision about whether that's enough.

What variety of cassava do you grow?
We've selected the cassava varieties grown on our farm to suit the soil, climate, and the flour we want to produce. The specific variety is proprietary and not something we disclose publicly.

Do you sun-dry the cassava?
No. Every drying step is mechanical, inside the factory. Sun-drying is common in commodity cassava processing — we don't use it because it introduces too much variability and too much contamination risk.

Do you use any chemicals in the process?
No. The full process is six mechanical steps: washing, peeling, grating, pressing, drying, milling. No bleaching, no solvents, no additives, no enzymes.

What's the difference between YAKÉVA and commodity cassava flour?
The short version: we own the farm and the factory, we set the harvest-to-mill window at 24 hours, and we run a single-crop facility. Commodity cassava flour aggregates roots from many farms over many days, often passes through brokers, and is processed in facilities that don't share our timing or single-crop discipline.

If you'd like to see the bag itself, our organic cassava flour product page has the full nutrition, weights, and ordering details.