The Twiga Foods Story: Fixing Africa’s broken food supply chain
In September of 2023, in a small commercial court in central Nairobi, a Dutch cloud-services reseller filed a petition to wind up one of Africa’s most celebrated technology startups.
The plaintiff was Incentro Africa, a partner of Google Cloud. The amount in dispute was two hundred and sixty-one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-eight US dollars and seventy-five cents. A cloud bill.
The defendant was Twiga Foods. Eleven months earlier, the President of Kenya had cut the ribbon on Twiga’s new two-hundred-thousand-square-foot distribution centre at Tatu City — a building into which the company had sunk roughly seventeen million dollars of fit-out. Two years before that, Goldman Sachs had led the largest known financing round of the year in Nairobi. By the time the Incentro petition was filed, Twiga’s total reported capital raised had passed one hundred and sixty million dollars.
And a quarter-million-dollar Google bill was being treated, in a Milimani court, as a credible threat to wind the company up.
Something had gone very wrong.
This is the story of Twiga Foods. The would-be Amazon for Africa’s kiosk economy. The company that raised one hundred and sixty million dollars to fix African food — and discovered, the hard and public way, that the math did not work.
The Banana That Could Not Be Shipped
The story of Twiga Foods does not begin with a warehouse, or a venture round, or a President cutting a ribbon. It begins with a banana that could not be shipped.
In 2012, in a friend’s living room in Nairobi, two men met who did not, on the face of it, have very much in common. Peter Njonjo was Kenyan, a career Coca-Cola executive then heading parts of the company’s East African bottling business, on track to take over Coca-Cola’s entire West and Central Africa unit out of Lagos. Grant Brooke was American — Texas-born, Princeton-educated, in Kenya since 2008 on a research path that had begun as ethnographic work on credit and religion in Nairobi’s slums, and which had quietly turned into a small commercial venture. Brooke was trying to export Kenyan bananas to the Middle East.
He had buyers. He had a margin. He could not, however, fill a forty-foot shipping container with consistent fruit at consistent quality, week after week, no matter how hard he tried.
The reason was not what an outsider would have guessed. Kenya grew enough bananas. Kenyan retailers sold enough bananas. The problem was the thing in the middle — four or five layers of brokers, market middlemen, transporters, and re-wholesalers, each taking a margin, each handling the fruit one more time, each adding noise to whatever supply eventually reached the final shelf.
What Brooke and Njonjo began to see, in conversations that ran from 2012 into 2014, was that this was not a banana problem. It was a structure problem. Kenya’s informal food sector turned over more than ten billion US dollars a year. Between eighty and ninety percent of the food urban Kenyans ate did not pass through a supermarket. It moved through more than two hundred thousand small kiosks — the mama mbogas, the dukawallas, the corner-store vendors who keep the country fed. And between the farm gate and that kiosk shelf there was no aggregator, no platform, no software, no consolidator of any kind. There were only the brokers.
The numbers the founders began to assemble were stark. Farmers, by the time their crop reached the kiosk, were receiving as little as thirty to forty percent of what the consumer ultimately paid. Post-harvest losses ran above thirty percent of the harvest — fruit and vegetables decaying somewhere between farm and shelf, paid for by farmer and retailer both. The middle was eating both ends.
If a single digitally-coordinated platform could compress that middle — could collapse four broker layers into one logistics layer, between two hundred thousand kiosks and a network of smallholder farmers — there was, on paper, enough margin in the gap to raise farmer prices, lower retailer prices, cut post-harvest waste, and still leave a profitable platform on what remained.
They called the company Twiga. Giraffe, in Swahili. The animal that, by virtue of its long neck, reaches what the other animals on the savanna cannot.
Twiga Foods was incorporated in 2014. The wedge product was the banana that had started the whole conversation. Bananas, supplied to Nairobi kiosks. Aggregated at small hubs near the growing clusters. Ordered by the kiosk operator over USSD on a basic feature phone, because most mama mbogas in 2014 did not yet have a smartphone. Delivered the next morning, at dawn, by a Twiga truck.
No middlemen. One platform. One delivery. One price.
Grant Brooke ran it day to day as chief executive. Peter Njonjo, still inside Coca-Cola, sat on the board and watched the experiment grow.
In 2017, three years into the experiment, Twiga closed its first major institutional round — a ten-point-three-million-dollar Series A, led with TLcom Capital and the IFC among others. The mama mboga business model was working route by route, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Trust was being earned the way trust in Kenya is always earned, which is slowly, and one customer at a time.
The platform, in 2017, was real. The story was still small.
What happened to it next was not small at all.
Goldman, and the Cost of Being Right
Between 2018 and 2021, Twiga went from being an interesting Nairobi experiment to being the company that international capital had decided Africa’s food supply chain would be fixed by.
The first years had been about trust.
Kenya’s mama mbogas had been promised better prices before. They had been promised next-day delivery before. Most of those promises had come from brokers and middlemen who eventually went back to their old behaviour, because that was where their incentives were. Twiga’s pitch was different — a startup, a price commitment, a published catalogue, an app — but pitches were cheap. The early business was won the way the existing business was lost: route by route, kiosk by kiosk, one delivery at a time. The unfair surcharge that the broker had been quietly adding for years had to be removed in cash terms that a kiosk operator could feel inside a single week, or the platform would not survive past Friday.
The other side of the platform was no less hard. Smallholder farmers deliver inconsistent quality, in inconsistent quantities, on inconsistent schedules. The aggregation and grading hubs Twiga built near growing clusters were capital-heavy from day one. Cold chain on a continent that mostly does not run cold chain is unforgiving. And the wholesale markets that the company was structurally bypassing — Wakulima, Marikiti, Gikomba — did not welcome the disruption. The tensions, in places, became openly hostile. They never fully went away.
In March 2019, Grant Brooke stepped back from the chief executive role into an executive director seat. Peter Njonjo, after twenty-one years inside Coca-Cola, finally left the corporation and joined Twiga full-time as chief executive officer. The press coverage at the time was uniformly positive. A founder with deep Africa operating roots, a Harvard executive program, and a Coca-Cola distribution résumé taking over a fast-growing Kenyan supply chain startup. By January of the following year, Brooke had stepped off active management entirely. The Kenyan press, with some care, noted “differences in the direction investors wanted to take the company.” It was the first public crack in the founder coalition. It would not be the last.
Seven months after Njonjo formally arrived, in October 2019, Twiga closed its Series B. Thirty million dollars in total — twenty-three and three-quarter million in equity led by Goldman Sachs and TLcom Capital, plus another six million in debt from the US government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation and Alpha Mundi. Goldman’s first cheque into Twiga. At the time, the largest known financing round of the year in Nairobi.
Goldman, in 2019, was not investing in African agritech as a sector. It was investing in Twiga.
Five months later, the pandemic arrived. Kenya went into lockdown in March 2020. Informal retail demand collapsed almost overnight as kiosk customers stayed home. The logistics-heavy business model that Twiga had built was exposed to a sudden volume shock at the exact moment the company was scaling its fleet. The team held the lights on. Fast Company, the same year, named Twiga the thirty-fifth most innovative company in the world. The World Economic Forum named it a Technology Pioneer. The narrative congealed. The African Amazon for food.
In November 2021, the validation arrived in capital form.
Fifty million dollars. A Series C led by Creadev — a Paris-based investment vehicle of the Mulliez family, the French retail dynasty behind Auchan and Decathlon. Joining the round: TLcom Capital, the International Finance Corporation, DOB Equity, and Juven — the Africa-focused growth fund spun out of Goldman Sachs’ merchant banking arm. The stated use of funds was geographic expansion. Ivory Coast. Ghana. Nigeria. The Democratic Republic of Congo. Twiga, having proven the model on Nairobi kiosks, was going to remake the kiosk economy of the entire continent.
The post-money valuation was never publicly confirmed. Industry estimates placed it between three hundred and five hundred million dollars.
By the close of 2021, Twiga had raised more than one hundred and thirty million dollars across all rounds. The thesis was vindicated. The runway was clean. The press was uniformly admiring.
What the founders did next is the part of the story that costs them the company.
The Cathedral, the Farm, and the Twenty Thousand Acres
The decision that bought Twiga the next four years — and arguably ended it — was taken some time in late 2021 or early 2022. The exact meeting is not in the public record. The shape of the decision is.
Twiga, after the Creadev round, had a choice. It could remain what it had been on paper — an asset-light marketplace platform sitting between smallholder farmers and informal retailers, owning the software and the relationships, but renting the physical capacity. Or it could go vertical. Own the warehouse. Own the farm. Own the trucks. Control the supply chain end to end.
It chose vertical. Three times. In quick succession.
In May 2022, Twiga launched a wholly-owned commercial farming subsidiary called Twiga Fresh. Ten million dollars of investment. Six hundred and fifty hectares of farmland in Taita-Taveta, on the southern Kenyan coast. Onions. Tomatoes. Watermelons. The stated rationale was traceability, supply stability, and stock-out elimination. The strategic reality was that Twiga, the company that had been pitched to Goldman Sachs as a marketplace for smallholder farmers, was now competing directly with smallholder farmers.
In November 2022, Twiga inaugurated its flagship distribution centre at Tatu City — two hundred thousand square feet of Grade-A logistics space on the northern edge of Nairobi, designed to handle up to eight million kilograms of fresh produce a day. Roughly two-point-two billion Kenyan shillings of facility investment — about seventeen million US dollars — sunk into a leased premium building. President William Ruto, eight weeks into his first term, cut the ribbon. The photographs went out across East Africa. African agritech, ascendant.
Four months later, in March 2023, the Kenyan government awarded Twiga a twenty-thousand-acre lease at Galana-Kulalu — the country’s flagship national food security project on the coast. Ten thousand acres of already-irrigated land. Ten thousand more to be developed at Twiga’s expense. Two million bags of maize a year, on paper.
Three commitments. The cathedral warehouse. The integrated farm. The continent’s largest single agritech land allocation.
Three bets, all of them implicitly asset-heavy. All of them dependent on cheap capital remaining cheap.
Then the macro turned.
By mid-2023, the operating environment was no longer the one in which those decisions had been taken. United States interest rates had climbed sharply, making the dollar-denominated debt that financed Twiga Fresh and the Tatu City fit-out two to three times more expensive to service. The Kenyan shilling lost more than twenty percent of its value against the dollar over the course of the year — every imported input more expensive, every dollar of debt heavier. The new Ruto administration’s tax package squeezed informal retail margins. The mama mbogas — Twiga’s customers — had less to spend. Twiga’s lenders — denominated in dollars — wanted more.
Cash flow inverted.
In August 2023, Twiga announced it was laying off two hundred and eighty-three employees — thirty-three percent of its workforce. The in-house delivery fleet was disbanded. Ten distribution centres were closed. The official framing was a pivot to an asset-light logistics marketplace. The unspoken reality was that the asset-heavy model could no longer be funded.
The following month, Incentro Africa filed its winding-up petition over the unpaid two-hundred-and-sixty-one-thousand-dollar cloud bill. Twiga obtained a temporary injunction. The matter would eventually be settled out of court, in January 2024. But the petition itself, public and on the court record, had already made the cash position visible to the market.
In the same month, the twenty-thousand-acre Galana-Kulalu lease was transferred out of Twiga Foods and into Selu Limited — a company personally owned by Peter Njonjo. No public valuation was disclosed. No commercial rationale was published. No Kenyan regulator, to date, has formally challenged the transaction. But the optics — the founder taking the largest single land asset out of the company in the months before his own departure — would not be forgotten.
In December 2023, Creadev and Juven extended Twiga a thirty-five-million-dollar convertible bond. Emergency capital, structured as debt with interest and an equity conversion option attached to it. Two weeks later, Peter Njonjo announced a six-month sabbatical, effective immediately. The following month, January 2024, he formally resigned from the Twiga board.
By the start of 2024, both founders were gone. Investor control was absolute. The thesis that Goldman Sachs had backed in 2019 was, in the politely worded language of corporate filings, being repositioned.
Project Easter
The operator brought in to clean up was named Charles Ballard.
Ballard was an American, fifteen years in Africa, nine of them in Kenya. His most recent role had been chief executive of Jumia Kenya — the East African operation of the continental e-commerce platform — where he had been credited, fairly, with steering a chronically loss-making business toward something resembling profitability. He was, in the polite shorthand of the Nairobi tech press, a turnaround operator.
He took the chief executive seat at Twiga on the first of May, 2024.
What followed, over the next twelve months, would be the most disputed period in the company’s history.
The public narrative, in late 2024 and early 2025, was a pivot. The asset-heavy model had not worked. The company would, going forward, be an asset-light technology and procurement platform — owning the software, the brand, the customer relationships, and the procurement scale — but no longer owning trucks, warehouses, or, increasingly, employees. Physical fulfilment would be outsourced to third-party distributors and partners.
In August 2024, fifty-nine more staff were let go. The framing remained sustainability and tough economic environment.
In April 2025, Twiga announced the acquisition of majority stakes in three Kenyan fast-moving-consumer-goods distributors — Jumra, in Nairobi; Sojpar, in Kisumu; Raisons, in Mombasa. The stated rationale was that the acquired companies brought formal-trade clients — supermarkets, hotels, restaurants — and existing distribution infrastructure that Twiga would otherwise have to rebuild from scratch. Twiga, which had spent eleven years building a vertically-integrated fresh-produce platform aimed at informal retail, was now positioning itself as an FMCG holding company with three regional distributor subsidiaries.
The same week, the Kenyan technology publication Tech-ish published a whistleblower account that would recast the entire restructuring.
An internal Twiga document — leaked by an unnamed source — described what the source called Project Easter. A phased plan. The existing Twiga Foods entity would be substantially wound down. The brand and the customer database would be licensed to a new entity — a NewCo. The Tatu City warehouse, which still had years left on its lease, would be vacated. Operations would move to a smaller, cheaper facility, with options weighed at Baba Dogo, Mombasa Road, and Syokimau. Three hundred and more of the remaining roughly four hundred and thirty-five staff would be terminated. Ten to twelve people would transfer to the NewCo. The legal effect, the whistleblower argued, would be a soft liquidation — a way to shed accumulated liabilities and contractual obligations under cover of what would be publicly described as a restructuring.
Twiga formally denied the framing. Charles Ballard published a public statement that said, in part, that there was no evidence of corruption and that the leaked documents represented exploratory scenario planning, not policy.
Over the following weeks, every concrete step the whistleblower had described took place.
In May 2025, Twiga formally created a holding company structure to house shared services across Twiga and its newly-acquired subsidiaries. More than three hundred roles were eliminated, primarily in supply chain. In June, Nairobi operations were temporarily halted for two months while the company vacated Tatu City and relocated to a smaller facility. In August, operations restarted under the new asset-light model. The cathedral that President Ruto had inaugurated thirty months earlier was, by the end of 2025, no longer Twiga’s.
In October 2025, the Employment and Labour Relations Court delivered another inconvenient detail — ruling against Twiga in a wrongful-dismissal case dating back to 2018, ordering compensation of around seven thousand eight hundred dollars to a former sales representative. A small sum. A useful precedent for the hundreds of other employees terminated through three years of restructuring.
Whether what happened over those twelve months was soft liquidation or lawful corporate restructuring became, in the end, an argument about words.
The actions were the same either way.
What’s Left of the Giraffe
By May 2026, Twiga is alive.
It operates eight distribution centres — most of them inherited from the three FMCG acquisitions — spread across Central, Coast, and Western Kenya. It serves both the informal-retail customer base it was founded for and the formal-trade clients it acquired into. Its reported annual revenue, according to third-party aggregators, is in the region of one hundred and sixty-five million US dollars, though the company has not filed audited results, and that figure should be treated as indicative. It has roughly one hundred and thirty-five permanent employees — down from a peak of close to one thousand eight hundred. It has no in-house delivery fleet. It has, for the first time since 2014, no original founder anywhere in its governance.
Twiga Fresh — the six-hundred-and-fifty-hectare farm in Taita-Taveta that contradicted the original marketplace thesis — is reportedly still operating, but its strategic role has receded. The twenty thousand acres at Galana-Kulalu are not Twiga’s. They sit, on paper, with Selu Limited.
The original Twiga — the company that was going to digitise African food supply at continental scale, that raised one hundred and sixty million dollars from Goldman Sachs and the World Bank to do it, that was profiled in Bloomberg and Fast Company as the proof point of African agritech — is gone. The leaner platform that still bears the brand may yet build something durable. Charles Ballard’s asset-light thesis is not, in itself, a bad bet. The acquired distributor network is real. The software is real. The mama mboga still receives her delivery in the morning.
But the empire is not.
The honest verdict — the one that requires no whistleblower, no judgment about the Galana-Kulalu transfer, no opinion on what the word liquidation should mean — is the one the numbers themselves deliver. A company that took eleven years and one hundred and sixty million dollars of international capital to build a position from which it could, today, distribute fast-moving consumer goods through eight depots in Kenya is not the company that was promised to the people who funded it.
What Twiga also became, almost incidentally, is the canonical case study of African venture capital’s 2021-vintage thesis. The thesis that you could out-fund the inefficiency of an informal market. That you could build the cathedral first, and the cash flow would follow. That what Africa’s mama mbogas were waiting for was a Silicon Valley platform with a Coca-Cola operator at the top and a Goldman cheque underneath. The thesis had been beautiful on the slide. The market that the thesis was supposed to digitise — the chaotic, suspicious, low-margin, deeply political world of two hundred thousand Kenyan kiosks — turned out to have its own clock, and its own price, and a great deal of patience for waiting startups out.
Twiga survived.
The story that Twiga told about itself did not.
Every empire has an origin.
Twiga’s was a banana that could not be shipped. Two unlikely founders in a friend’s living room in Nairobi. A platform that, for a moment, looked like it would remake an entire continent’s food system.
What survives is smaller, quieter, and less certain than what was promised.
But the kiosk is still open. The delivery still comes in the morning. And somewhere on the side of a warehouse, faded but still standing, the long neck of the giraffe is still in the brand.
This is Asili Africa.
Key Takeaways
- The Banana That Could Not Be Shipped. The story of Twiga Foods does not begin with a warehouse, or a venture round, or a President cutting a ribbon.
- The Cathedral, the Farm, and the Twenty Thousand Acres. The decision that bought Twiga the next four years — and arguably ended it — was taken some time in late 2021 or early 2022.
- Project Easter. The operator brought in to clean up was named Charles Ballard.
- What’s Left of the Giraffe. By May 2026, Twiga is alive.
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