Kenya’s Twiga Foods part of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies in 2022
The TIME’s annual list of most influential companies is live. Under the Disruptors section, Twiga Foods is listed alongside TikTok, Opibus, Shein and more. The company is listed because of how it is disrupting Kenya’s food supply chain, which as structured, brings about high prices of commodities.
Twiga Foods solution is to let retailers place orders via a mobile device, granting them 48 hours of interest-free credit, and giving them time to sell what they order to customers before the bill comes due.
Twiga Foods says it has over 130,000 retailers, served through a fleet that covers a cumulative 12,000Kms daily and handling over 1.2Million Kgs of assorted products every day.
Africa countries despite abundance of arable land still has food production and distribution challenges. Many cities across the continent have incalculable informal retailers and marketplaces that require to be connected to the food producers rapidly and deliver value for consumers.
To tackle this problem, Twiga Foods is using its mobile based platform – Soko Yetu (Our Market) to bring the diverse assortment of products to informal retailers, allowing them to shop and have it delivered to their doorsteps within 24 hours. This removes the need for many intermediaries, significantly lowering the cost of food for consumers.
Twiga is now targeting a pan-African expansion to East African markets like Uganda and Tanzania. The company is also investing in developing an alternative way of producing food on the continent and covering both ends of traceability and mass scale. The initiative aims to reduce consumers prices for popular fresh food products by over 30%.
“We are offering informal retailers in Africa what global retail chains have established in more developed markets, efficient, digitized, and integrated supply chains. Since informal retailers do not have the scale and capital do this on their own, we are building it and becoming their back-office, “said Twiga Foods Founder and CEO, Peter Njonjo.
