African Hidden Champions- Twiga Foods

Twiga is a B2B e-commerce company, but the way we think of e-commerce in this part of the world, at least from a Twiga perspective, is that we want to be the back office of informal retail. Informal retailers face so many challenges in terms of procuring high-quality product competitively every day, and what we want to do is offer them a one-stop shop to basically connect the producers with the retailers more efficiently and essentially removing the friction to commerce between those two layers. We started with one product, it was bananas. Figured out how to do the distribution from farm plus mile distribution to the kiosk, perfected that, then expanded the basket, brought a lot of products on board. And look at Syntec and how we've designed it, our version of buy now, pay later. It's very, very specific to the target market tree we work with, which gives us a good advantage in the marketplace. If you take a very, very customer-centric approach in building technology, then there is benefits to it. So you have to go there and sit with the mama mboga with the type of smartphone that they have and ensure that you're building the product that they can actually use. We also know through our Circle loan facility, so we're providing working capital to these shops. That's a big challenge that they encountered before because your ability to stock up your shop is only limited to how much cash you have, because it's a cash-intensive business, so you're recycling your cash flow. And so by us providing this loan facility, it then essentially means that we're giving you access to a lot more products that you can then sell to your consumers. We are creating entrepreneurs in their own rights. The farmer becomes an entrepreneur because you're now able to grow your bananas and Twiga guarantees offtake of this product. You can grow your bananas comfortably knowing that Twiga Foods is going to come and be the uptake of your bananas and give you a good price and provide market for you. Most of the small-scale farmers, they do not have the scale to supply us every day, so we had to build collection centers. Those collection centers means I can go deliver product thrice a week and they still critical mass for us to actually take the product out. So we've built these collection centers in places where we have a high density of smallholder farmers who are growing a certain crop. So we've done this very, very successfully with bananas. Our agents go out, they help the farmer harvest, so they get the product, it comes to our warehouse. Once we validate, we pay you in 48 hours.

This is our distribution center in Nairobi, and this is our FMCG operation and our fresh operation for nationwide distribution. If you're looking at the efficiencies and speed of operation to really get the best out of this nice facility and obviously to serve our customers on a daily basis, you've fallen around time. By the time the product gets here, we already have customers who are ordering this on the platform. So the advantage that we have as Twiga is that we've been able to aggregate the demand in the market, and by aggregating the demand, we can take bets on inventory that many other players cannot take because they don't have market access. Between April 2019 and now, we've grown our revenue 17x. That means that every six months we're like a different company. So the only way you're able to reinvent yourself is by having a young and dynamic workforce.

They actually don't see limitations, they just see possibilities. And that's basically the culture that we've tried to build within the business, because unless you do that, it's very hard to make such a business a success.

The key thing for us is we have to provide high quality but at affordable prices, and I have to then hold the entire supply chain accountable in delivering that quality every day. So it's an everyday conversation, and for you to do that, you have to then care about both sides of the equation. But this is not about Twiga, this is about creating a food-sustainable and food-sovereign country and continent. Twiga is leading the charge to ensure that this happens. The people we started with, they were very, very small. Today I'm seeing people investing in 10 acres, 20 acres, 30 acres of bananas, and this was smallholder farmers, and that has essentially transformed their lives.