Africa Eats’ mission is to lower hunger and eliminate poverty across Africa. Dropping post-harvest losses from 40% to 2% is one way to lower hunger. The other is increasing the incomes of farmers, which simultaneously and directly eliminates poverty. On average, the bizi double the income of their farmers. The increases range from 60% for the honey aggregators to 400% for Goldenpot‘s...
What happens when you put two dozen entrepreneurs in a room together for two days, and rather than speak to them, facilitate conversations between them? The results feel magical. The companies open up to to share the challenges they face, and from that they share solutions that have already been tried including solutions that actually work. Challenges such as how to efficiently work with 1,000+...
In the 2022 letter to shareholders, one of Warren Buffett’s best quotes was, “At Berkshire, there will be no finish line.“ Africa Eats is not a fund. We don’t exist for just 10 years, to create a short-term growth spurt, gain a profit for our investors, and disappear from the world. Instead, our business model includes some core ideas from Berkshire Hathaway, with the...
A conversation with Luni Libes, serial entrepreneur and investor, about the enormous opportunities of African food companies and on buying from smallholder farmers and selling into the local regional markets. We also discuss why the traditional venture capital model doesn’t make any sense and a holding company does, plus why and how he wants to take the holding company public in a few years’ time...
The biggest learning from 2022 is that the plan envisioned in 2018 works. In 2018, the vision was an investment holding company that helps high growth food/ag-focused SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) in Africa grow faster than traditional venture capital or debt funds. The core of the plan was to fill in the “missing middle” of capital for a few dozen companies, providing them the...
Africa Eats’ recipe is one cup venture capital fund, two cups business accelerator, and three heaping teaspoons of Berkshire Hathaway. Add in two dozen fast-growing, homegrown, bottom-up for-profit solutions to hunger and poverty across Africa. Stir vigorously. Feeds billions. This isn’t some old family recipe. Neither is it the common way these things are done. But after...
The six months of 2022 continues the revenue growth we’re used to at Africa Eats. An aggregate of $11.6 million was earned by our portfolio companies, putting them on track to reach $24M-$25M for the whole year. To put this in some perspective, when we launched Africa Eats back in 2020 we were touting a total of $6.7 million in revenues in 2019. The same portfolio earned that just in Q2...
The bizi of Africa Eats work with over 100,000 smallholder farmers, buying their outputs or providing their inputs. In either case, growing the incomes of these farmers between 40% and 500%, turning a typically subsistence activity into a middle class income. Growing this network above 100,000 took quite some time, as there needs to be a buyer for every piece of fruit, bag of maize flour, or...
Africa Eats funds and supports for-profit solutions to hunger and poverty. We are capitalists, not philanthropists. But unlike most capitalists, we don’t hide from risk, seeking the safest returns, but instead follow the opportunities where few others are investing, seeking the biggest opportunities for growth and thus the biggest opportunities for returns. That is why we focus on food...
Africa Eats may only have been around since 2020, but 14 of our portfolio companies have been operating since at least 2016. What is amazing to see is the growth of these companies. We’ve previously touted their growth in terms of aggregate revenues. Today let’s instead look at their growth in terms of individual scale, dividing them up by those above $250,000 in annual revenues (USD...