The Twiga Foods Story: The empire that outgrew its math
In April, twenty twenty five, a company in Nairobi took majority stakes in three distributors.
Their names were Jumra, Sojpar and Raisons.
A distributor’s work is to stand between the companies that make goods and the shops that sell them.
With the three came eight regional depots.
The company buying them had been founded in twenty fourteen to take layers out of the chain between Kenya’s farms and its kiosks.
Its name was Twiga Foods.
ONE CONTAINER
Peter Njonjo spent about twenty one years at Coca-Cola. By the end, he was president of its West and Central Africa business.
Whatever else that job was, it was a job about distribution.
Getting a product from the place it is made to every small shop that sells it, every day, is the whole of that trade.
His co-founder was Grant Brooke, an American investor and entrepreneur.
Around twenty fourteen, in Nairobi, the two of them planned a business that had nothing to do with kiosks.
They would export bananas to the Middle East.
An export deal is measured in containers. A buyer abroad wants a container of fruit of one grade, packed to one standard, that can be traced back to where it was grown.
Kenya had the bananas. They grew on small farms, a few bunches here and a few bunches there.
What the chain could not supply was proof. Smallholder supply had no traceability. The quality was not consistent. And nobody along the way was keeping records.
Njonjo and Brooke could not fill even one container.
The fruit existed. The chain could not vouch for it. The export deal fell through.
So the bananas went somewhere else. The founders sold them to informal vendors in Nairobi: the kiosks, the dukas, and the mama mboga, the women who sell vegetables from small stalls across the city.
The vendors bought. And the founders began to build ordering and distribution around them.
Between a farm and a mama mboga’s stall there were, by the company’s own account, three to five layers of intermediaries, passing produce toward markets such as Wakulima, the big wholesale market in Nairobi, and on to the stalls.
Each layer took a margin. Each handling took time, and fresh food does not keep.
Compress those layers, the argument went, and three things happen at once. The farmer earns more. The vendor pays less. And less food rots on the way.
Twiga’s own figure for that last promise was that post harvest losses could fall from around thirty percent to around four.
That was the company’s claim. We have found no independent measurement of it.
Njonjo liked to make the case with tomatoes. A tonne of them, he said, sold wholesale for about a hundred dollars in California, and for about four hundred in Kenya.
In twenty sixteen, the company raised about a million dollars in early money.
Do not fight the chain to get fruit out of Kenya. Sell to the vendors at home, and build the chain yourself.
That was the idea.
NEXT MORNING
In the evening, a mama mboga closing up her stall could place an order for the next day from a basic phone, through a simple text menu, and later through an app.
She paid by M-Pesa.
And the stock arrived the next morning, at her stall, before her first customers.
From her side, that was the whole service. No trip to the wholesale market. No haggling with a broker over the day’s price. An order, a payment and a delivery.
The promise to her was the promise of the thesis: produce at a lower price than the market, without the trip.
Behind it, Twiga was building the part she never saw: its own warehouses, its own trucks, its own cold chain, and its own sourcing from farms.
The layers it meant to remove were not simply removed. Their work still had to be done: collecting, sorting, storing, carrying.
Twiga was now the one doing that work, and paying for it.
None of it was easy to build. The early problems were the ones the container had shown: getting vendors to trust a company they had never dealt with, holding the quality of smallholder produce steady, and the cost of keeping fresh food cold.
In twenty seventeen, the company closed its first institutional round.
In twenty eighteen, it added packaged goods to the fresh produce, the boxed and bottled things a kiosk sells beside its vegetables. One history of the company says the reason was to fill the trucks.
Then the founders changed places. Grant Brooke had run the company as chief executive since its founding.
In March twenty nineteen, he moved from chief executive to an executive director’s role. In January twenty twenty, he left active management, and kept a seat on the board.
The press at the time reported differences over direction between him and the company’s investors.
Peter Njonjo left Coca-Cola, and in twenty nineteen he became Twiga’s chief executive.
The company’s first chief executive stepped aside, and the co-founder who had spent two decades in distribution took the chair. From here on, the people paying for the thesis were paying for it to grow.
In October twenty nineteen, Goldman Sachs led a thirty million dollar Series B. About twenty four million of it was equity, and about six million was debt, from OPIC and AlphaMundi.
A Wall Street bank had led a round in a company selling tomatoes to roadside stalls in Nairobi.
One account adds about twenty nine million dollars of debt from IFC and KCB in twenty twenty.
In November twenty twenty one, Creadev led a fifty million dollar Series C. TLcom, IFC, DOB Equity and Juven came in beside it.
By the company’s count, at its peak, about a hundred and forty thousand retailers were ordering through Twiga, and around twelve thousand deliveries went out each day, across twelve cities.
A company that began with bananas nobody could export had built something real enough for investors to put fifty million dollars behind it.
TATU CITY
In May twenty twenty two, Twiga started a commercial farm. It was called Twiga Fresh.
It covered about six hundred and fifty hectares, and it was reported to have cost about ten million dollars.
The company that had been built to connect farmers to kiosks now owned a farm.
It was also building a hub. North of Nairobi, at Tatu City, Twiga fitted out a distribution centre, at a cost the company put at about two point two billion shillings.
It was the heaviest piece of the middle Twiga had built so far: one building where produce and packaged goods would come in, be sorted, and go out to the kiosks.
The argument for a hub is volume. The more that passes through one building, the less each crate costs to move.
One analyst, writing at Africanist, argues that Twiga assumed scale would fix its economics, and never showed that it did.
Business Daily reported that the President had directed three hundred million shillings from the Hustler Fund, the government’s credit fund for small borrowers, for Twiga to lend on to its suppliers.
We have found no source that says whether that money was paid out, whether it was repaid, or whether any of it is among the claims being counted now.
It was public money, and the public record on it stops at the report.
President William Ruto opened the hub in November twenty twenty two.
The same month, Twiga cut more than two hundred jobs.
Two hundred and eleven sales staff were moved off salaries and made commission agents, paid on what they sold. Employee allowances were cut by three quarters.
An agent on commission costs the company nothing in a week when nothing sells. A salaried rep costs the same either way. Moving two hundred and eleven people from one to the other moved the risk of a slow week off the company and onto them.
The ribbon and the first cuts belong to the same month. The cuts did not wait for a bad year. They arrived as the hub opened.
In August twenty twenty three, Twiga cut two hundred and eighty-three people, about a third of a staff of roughly eight hundred and fifty.
It disbanded its in house delivery fleet. The trucks of the early years would no longer be Twiga’s own.
The fleet had been what put stock at a stall before the first customer. It was the first piece of that middle to go.
In September twenty twenty three, a cloud services firm called Incentro petitioned the court to liquidate Twiga, over unpaid cloud bills of about two hundred and sixty two thousand dollars. The amount itself is disputed.
A company that had raised more than a hundred million dollars was answering a petition over a cloud bill.
An injunction followed, and in January twenty twenty four the two sides settled out of court.
By then Twiga had carried a farm, a hub, a fleet and a salaried sales force. Each was a piece of the middle it had set out to remove, and each was paid for with investors’ money.
The easy reading of twenty twenty three is that a hard year broke a working business.
Outlets covering the administration report that Twiga never made a profit, in any of its twelve years. No audited accounts have been made public. That is reported, not proven.
We looked for a revenue figure, a loss, a single year of results from a source that had seen the books. We did not find one. The numbers in circulation come from data aggregators, and none of them traces back to the company’s accounts.
If that reporting is right, the order of events reads differently. Twenty twenty three did not break a working business. It showed one that had never been shown to work.
CONVERTIBLE
In December twenty twenty three, two of Twiga’s existing investors, Creadev and Juven, put more money in. It came as a convertible bond, reported as thirty five million dollars. One account puts it lower, at about twenty two point six million.
Creadev and Juven had both been in the fifty million dollar round two years earlier.
A convertible bond is a loan that can turn into shares. The investor lends now, and later may take a larger piece of the company instead of being repaid.
Across the decade, the money had changed shape. First came equity rounds, where new investors bought a share of the growth.
Then came debt, from development finance institutions, lenders owned by governments to invest in poorer economies, and from banks.
And now a loan from investors who were already inside.
That is not unusual, and it is not a verdict on anyone. But it means the last money in came from people already committed to Twiga, and not from anyone new who had looked at the business from outside.
On the fourteenth of December, twenty twenty three, Peter Njonjo announced a sabbatical. In January twenty twenty four, he left the board.
Dealroom reports that before he left, he put about a million dollars of his own money into the company.
No reason for the sabbatical appears in the record, and we are not going to supply one.
By twenty twenty four, neither founder sat on the board. The two men who could not fill a container ten years earlier were no longer running the company that failure had started.
On the first of May, twenty twenty four, Charles Ballard became chief executive. He had been chief executive of Jumia Kenya, and he was brought in to turn the company around.
He was the first chief executive who had not founded the company.
That same month, Copia, another Kenyan company selling into informal retail, entered administration.
In August twenty twenty four, fifty nine more roles went.
In a little over a year, control had moved. The founders were out. The investors who had lent the last money were in. And the running of the company was in the hands of an operator the board had hired.
And the company kept trading. It had money in hand from the bond, a chief executive hired to steady it, and a business that was still running.
THREE DISTRIBUTORS
In April twenty twenty five, Twiga took majority stakes in three distributors, Jumra, Sojpar and Raisons, and with them eight regional depots.
The platform itself was moving onto other people’s trucks, hired rather than owned.
Packaged goods, first added in twenty eighteen to fill the trucks, were now the core of what was left.
Over ten years, Twiga had built a middle of its own: a sales force, a fleet, a farm, a hub. Now it was letting those pieces go, and buying a middle that already existed.
These distributors are not the fresh produce brokers of Wakulima. They are a different trade, handling different goods.
But the model is the one Twiga began by arguing against: a business that stands between the goods and the shelf, and is paid for standing there.
That same month, the Kenyan technology outlet Tech-ish published slides it said had leaked from inside the company. The source was anonymous. The plan in the slides was called Project Easter.
The slides counted four hundred and thirty five staff. Three hundred and nineteen were to leave. Ten to twelve were to move to a new company. And the lease on the Tatu City hub was called an albatross.
Four hundred and thirty five was fewer than half the staff the company had reported three years earlier.
Twiga denied it. No liquidation had been initiated, the company said. No assets had been transferred. No new entity had been formed. The slides were exploratory scenario planning.
The company’s position, then, was that the slides were a set of options, not a decision.
In May twenty twenty five, Twiga set up a holding company, and cut more than three hundred roles.
In June, operations at the Tatu City hub were suspended.
The hub a President had opened two and a half years earlier had become, in the leaked slides, a lease the company wanted to be rid of.
Those events are on the record. The record does not show whether the motive the leak described was real.
And Tech-ish, which published the leak, has since measured what followed against its own story, which gives it a stake in how that story is told.
From twenty twenty two to twenty twenty five, Twiga cut staff four times, and several hundred people left.
No source we found reports whether severance was paid, where those people went, or how the commission agents of twenty twenty two fared.
The only worker named anywhere in the record is a sales representative called Kibira, dismissed in twenty eighteen.
In October twenty twenty five, the Employment and Labour Relations Court ruled in his favour, in Kibira versus Twiga Foods, over an illegal deduction of about four hundred and twenty six thousand shillings from his pay. The award came to about one million shillings.
One name, out of several hundred.
In June twenty twenty five, Twiga halted its operations in Nairobi, the city where it had first sold bananas to vendors.
Somewhere in that city was a mama mboga who had ordered the night before, for stock the next morning.
No source records what she did instead, whether she still owed Twiga money, or whether she went back to the market.
GT FLOW
In January twenty twenty six, a creditor filed a petition at Milimani, in the High Court in Nairobi, to liquidate Twiga Tatu SEZ Limited, the company that holds the Tatu City hub. The amount was not disclosed.
That petition concerns the hub company, and it is a separate case from what came next.
On the seventeenth of August, twenty twenty six, GT Flow Limited, formerly Twiga Foods One Limited, the operating company, entered administration.
Its own board appointed the administrator, Mohamed Mohamed.
The notice appeared in the Kenya Gazette, the government’s official notice paper, on the eleventh of September.
Administration is not liquidation. The administrator takes control of the company’s assets, and the directors lose it. Lawsuits against the company are paused.
The aim can be to rescue the business, to get creditors a better result than a winding up would, or to sell it. An administration runs for twelve months unless a court extends it.
Creditors were given until the eleventh of October, twenty twenty six, to file their claims.
As of late September twenty twenty six, no list of creditors or amounts has been published. After that date, the administrator will know what is owed, and to whom. We have not seen it.
The last money in, back in twenty twenty three, was a bond from investors already inside.
At the hub company, a creditor had gone to court. At the operating company, it was the board that acted, handing control to an administrator it chose. Nobody forced it through the door.
Nothing public says what Creadev, Juven, Goldman Sachs or the development finance lenders expect to recover, or why the board chose this route.
IFC, part of the World Bank Group, was among the investors. Some of the money at stake is public development finance.
No statement from Peter Njonjo, Grant Brooke or Charles Ballard appears in the coverage of the administration. Whether Ballard still leads the company is not established.
We do not know who else is owed, or whether small suppliers are among them.
We do not know whether Jumra, Sojpar and Raisons are still trading, whether any mama mboga is still being served, or whether the brand is for sale.
Across twelve years, Twiga raised roughly one hundred and eighty five million dollars in disclosed equity and debt, according to Crunchbase. Other trackers put the figure lower, and they do not agree with each other.
The same analyst at Africanist goes further. On that reading, Twiga spent those twelve years proving the efficiency of the system it set out to replace.
The brokers and traders, the argument runs, had advantages a platform could not easily match: family labour, vehicles long since paid for, and credit extended on trust.
That is one analyst’s reading. It is a question, not a finding. No source we found asked the brokers, the transporters or the traders of Wakulima what Twiga changed for them.
And no accounts were ever published that would show whether the middle Twiga built cost less than the one it set out to replace.
The administration could still end in a rescue, a sale or a winding up. No source says which.
Administration is not an ending. Nobody has written this one yet.
At the start, two founders could not fill one container, because nobody along the chain could say where the fruit had come from or how good it would be.
The company that grew out of that failure made its first promise to the people at the start of that chain. The farmers would earn more.
Twelve years later, no source records what those farmers earned through Twiga, whether they were paid in the end, or what they do now.
An administrator has until August twenty twenty seven, unless a court extends it, to decide what is left.
This is Asili Africa. Every empire has an origin. See you on the next one.
Key Takeaways
- ONE CONTAINER. Peter Njonjo spent about twenty one years at Coca-Cola.
- TATU CITY. In May twenty twenty two, Twiga started a commercial farm.
- CONVERTIBLE. In December twenty twenty three, two of Twiga’s existing investors, Creadev and Juven, put more money in.
- GT FLOW. In January twenty twenty six, a creditor filed a petition at Milimani, in the High Court in Nairobi, to liquidate Twiga Tatu SEZ Limited, the company that holds the Tatu City hub.
In this series: Failed Funded
- Sendy
- Twiga Foods (this episode)
- MarketForce
Also available on YouTube — search “Asili Africa” or subscribe to our channel.
Pingback: Sendy / TABB — The Comeback - Synthetic Africa