Enterprise came naturally to me. As a young girl of 8 years, I discovered early that I have a knack for business; from selling chin chin in class to sautéed meat, my innate sense of enterprise kept seeking expression.
Knowing that entrepreneurship is about using one’s brain to solve a problem, I started looking for ways to solve a problem on campus as a student entrepreneur. I was in my sophomore year in the University of Ibadan and went to visit a friend living in another dormitory. A hullaballoo that erupted when a student exclaimed she wanted to visit the market as others clamoured her with their shopping lists made me realize students do not like going to the market because of the filth, stench, stress and haggling with belligerent market women. I saw this need as a business opportunity and birthed Soupah Kitchen as a delivery business on campus. I raised capital by selling my laptop and used the proceeds to purchase a delivery bicycle, a mini refrigerator, raw materials and designed flyers.
This same business now has a factory, 4 retail outlets, 12 staff and a farm land from where produce are sourced.
Link to online video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I3maVIJozY
Your products and services
With products such as parboiled pepper, blanched vegetables, steamed cochorus and okra, we help our customers spend less time in the kitchen , at the same time, encourage home-style meals and better eating in this health deficient society where a great deal is spent on fast food and junk food.
Our Pepper and tomato products range from original blend with ginger flavour to extra rich with chicken flavour, beef flavour, crayfish flavour and yellow peppered sauce. Our shredded and lightly steamed and blanched vegetables are in varieties of ginger and onion spices.
All finished products are packaged in biodegradable plastics and nylon for quality and environmental friendliness and are sold from our store freezer lines to keep them extremely fresh with the home-made taste.
Most importantly, Soupah Kitchen responds to an environmental concern by redirecting surplus produce in farmers markets from landfills to healthy soups for the store freezer lines, thereby, increasing farmers’ profit and reducing the amount of resources wasted and emissions polluting the earth.
Your success factors
We are in the business of helping our customers to relive their daily stresses of what to fix for meals whiles saving them time, effort and even money and our keys to success are;
- Presenting a high level of quality in our product line with variety of customer preference
- Preserve healthy finished products in optimal frozen conditions to maintain freshness while in store
- Offering several advantages to our consumers:
- Spending less time in the kitchen
- Less money on groceries and eating out- unhealthy bad-taste meals in fast food joints, etc.
- Clean-up is easy, because most prep is done outside the home/hostel and all products come in disposable containers
- Less time spent at the market or shopping
- Within minutes customers have their meals
Your factors differentiating and disruptive compared to the existing
Our competitors’ products are saturated with preservatives and additives in other to increase their shelf lives and to prevent the bacteria in it from growing. These preservative chemicals have harmful effect on consumer’s health.
Our products are better with the provision of several advantages such as all natural, wholesome, frozen products in different variants with homemade taste and without preservatives. Our better quality products are different in both taste and texture and are sold at relatively low prices.
Our competitors lack the appeals of humanitarian and environmental concern that we have incorporated into the business. Our products and services are humanitarian and environmental because beyond making profit, we are concerned with improving the conditions that people (our customers, local farmers, the hungry and the planet) live in.
By leveraging on our competitive edge, which is the perfect combination of good intentions (providing healthy quality products and saving the earth), good sense of empathy (donating to the hungry) and good sense of economics (maximizing profit), we are positioned as a 21st century company that serves the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit.
Your business model
The strategy by which we will generate money and be financially stable is through sales and Cash management which is in constantly cutting costs, and the investment of retained earnings. Our sales strategy focuses first on providing the highest quality products to our target customer.
We will keep introducing new lines of delicious, frozen premium products of soups, stews, and fruit products at competitive prices and constantly improve on our product packaging to keep food fresh for longer and lengthen the shelf-life of our products in a natural, healthy way.
A few words about your competitors
Our direct competitors are the likes of House of chi that produces Pepe Tera, a brand of pepper paste and Watanmal group that produces Pomo and Gino Tomato paste. Honeysuckles PTL Ventures and Omo Alata foods produce blended packaged pepper. However, our products differentiate us from these competitors as we provide different tastes, texture and flavours; the variety not found in the traditional ready-to-cook sector of the agriculture industry.
Your website
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