Hello everyone, happy Q2 from us at the Vendease Colony.
We’re now in the second quarter of 2023 and I’d like to share a few thoughts and updates about Vendease, how far we’ve come, where we are, and where the company is headed in 2023 and beyond.
Vendease has come a long way from when we launched in January 2020 as a middle-party working to solve the challenges and inefficiencies of procurement in Nigeria’s highly fragmented food sector.
We’ve reinvented ourselves several times in the last three years, and now we’re positioned to be the go-to provider for operational services and tools that power food businesses in Africa.
Our three-year journey
We’ve gone from just being a marketplace to Africa’s food operating system, to providing solutions to key processes of running a food business. From procuring food supplies and providing credit facilities for that, we have gone on to test softwares that cater to:
Inventory management processes.
Menu costing
Payments
Order management and automated reconciliation
We’re optimistic about the promise that this infrastructure holds for the profitability and scalability of Africa’s food businesses, and we are thankful for the 3,000+ businesses spread across Ghana and Nigeria that have trusted us with this evolution process.
What has changed?
In 2023, we’re building Vendase on three fronts: procurements, payments and data. These pillars feed each other and help us better serve the core focus points of food businesses.
In choosing to serve this focus, our systems have had to evolve to match our growth in the past three years.
Typical of high-growth startups, many things have broken along the way and we’ve had to repair and improve our systems.
For example, at some point we started doing the amount of transactions we used to do in a whole month in one day. Soon after, we were doing the amount of transactions used to do in a whole month In one hour. We’ve also grown from four co-founders to around 300 people in the organisation.
To help us build better and faster, we’ve brought in more experienced hands to complement pre-existing efforts. Expect nothing short of premium experiences with our services.
In all, we are learning everyday, expanding and growing on the basics we already know because things change very fast.
What to expect moving forward?
We’ve been growing fast and 2023 will see us growing even faster. We have launched new products across media, technology and data, and we’ll bring them under one access point to build a plug-and-play service for food businesses.
Regardless of the stage of any food business, we will have a solution for them. With this consolidated approach, a Nigerian food business will be able to expand to Ghana easily and vice-versa, because we have done the heavy lifting. And the same will be rolled out for multiple countries soon.
As we work towards this audacious scaling of food businesses, here are some of the products we have added to our suite:
Flow: a simple inventory manager that can work on your phone and ensure you take stock better than ever.
CostEasy: the smart menu costing tool that suggests the best price to sell your meals.
Vendease’ POS: for taking orders, and reconciling payments for them without bulky paper piles.
Open Sauce: for telling the undiscovered stories of Africa’s vibrant food scene.
By the end of this quarter, we’ll have a one-stop app that brings together procurement, inventory management, meal costing, and order management. And as we go further into the year, we will expand to even more countries and cities. Remember, the vision is to ensure that food businesses have a plug-and-play system in any country/city we are present.
We’re immensely grateful for the support of our clients, suppliers, employees, investors, advisors and everyone in the ecosystem. Thank you once again for choosing Vendease; we hope to delight you even more in 2023 and beyond. The Vendants go marching on, ready to take on challenges five times our size!
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Tunde Kara,
CEO at Vendease
