In a just-published article by TechCrunch, Vendease made news as a platform that is “building Amazon Prime for restaurants in Africa.”
For small and mid-sized restaurants in Nigeria and most of Africa, food procurement can be a complex process to manage. The system is such that a business can easily run out of money or have considerable savings. Most restaurants don’t have access to deal directly with farms to get better deals because they lack the staffing to chase them. Besides, they also don’t have the aggregation pull as single entities to directly get good value from the farms.
Nigerian startup Vendease solves this problem by building a marketplace that allows restaurants to buy directly from farms and food manufacturers.
— TechCrunch
As much as Vendease helps restaurants a lot, it also looks out for the vendors and farmers involved in the supply chain. Typically it takes two to three months for these set of customers to get the payments and this happens because restaurants and hotels take too long to balance their books before making payments. In effect, farmers and vendors mark up their prices to mitigate losses, making products more expensive for restaurants and hotels. But now, VendEase is helping these customers reduce the waiting time to days.
In the next five years, the one-year-old company wants to be the “operating system for food supplies in Africa.” Vendease CEO – Tunde Kara talks of plans to expand to other African cities in the coming months but is tight-lipped on the names.
As YC Demo Day approaches, the team will be looking to raise some money and follows Egypt’s Breadfast as the only restaurant-focused companies from Africa (although they have very different business models) that the accelerator has funded.
