Our Journey as a Food Producer Organisation
in Botswana

Featured Article

Top business strategist

1. Briefly tell our readers about your businesses?

We are registered as a food manufacturing company called Pinnacle Foods, trademark My Farmhouse Kitchens, in Botswana. We are an organization in development. This means putting the organization and its people in place, including work and business processes, accounting, personnel, administration, operations, and business development. We work exclusively in the private sector space. We also do seedling production and for farmers who adopt regenerative farming practices, we intend to buy back their products for our food production.

I have also set up a second organization that is based on the professional work that I do. It is a national strategy leadership development institute that trains corporate and sectoral leaders to understand ways to turn persistent issues that hold back the development of their sector or the nation, around. Works begin at the central government and gradually expand to include all sectors of an economy.

2. What inspired you to start My Farmhouse Kitchens?

My Farmhouse Kitchens or MFK for short, began with the love of good tastes for the curry puffs and to bring them to the people who have traveled abroad or others who moved to work in the country. With time, the line between them and the locals who enjoyed the product disappeared as more tasted it. However, as a strategy development consultant, I was also curious to learn what helps or does not help organizations grow as agriculture and manufacturing companies here. My Farmhouse Kitchens has become a testbed to learn and to test ideas that organizations can try for themselves.

3. How has the business been doing?

We have been investing in infrastructure and work processes as well as marketing ourselves to farmers and corporates. The market is still new to us but we are seeing interests and growth with time.

4. How many people have you employed?

We currently have ten people on our roll.

5. You don’t use pesticides in your nursery, how do you control pests?

Soil is a living organism. On the other hand, the widespread use of chemicals on our soils leads to soils that no longer have the biology required to support healthy plant growth. The soil has fewer nutritional material remain in the soil resulting in plants that quickly become weak and diseased. They are no longer protected by bacteria and fungi and instead are attacked by them. Fertilizer is the direct cause of the use of most pesticides. The question we need to ask ourselves is how can we improve the soil? A healthy plant is a partnership between the plant, specialist bacteria, fungi, and healthy soil matter called humus which creates a great deal of food for soil life needed for natural soil recovery. At MFK-Gardens Nursery, we have learned to create a healthy eco-system using the above understanding for the nursery which has meant we do not use chemicals to grow our seedlings. These learnings are shared with our farmers in our workshop programmes.

6. I understand you came here as a strategy consultant for the government of Botswana and did research on unemployment in Botswana, what are your findings?

Yes, the research was completed in 2018 and presented in early 2019. The agriculture and manufacturing bases are typically the biggest creators of employment in an economic system, and form the base of the pyramid supporting the other sectors in the economy. Retail and government are often the apexes of the pyramid. For us here, these two sectors overtake the above in size. With weak sectors in its base, the economy is threatened by unemployment and inflation.

7. What do you think needs to be done to address it?

The first is to reflect the data as it is, to the people and the consequences of the reality and consider the choices it wants to make. The agriculture and manufacturing bases will require persons with deep knowledge and skills in subjects such as mathematics and sciences and integrate them to build strong industrial chains of organizations that build a strong economy.

8. Have you ever approached BUAN about the agriculture and food processing business?

We are currently liaising with UB on building our food manufacturing work processes. This has meant working with its industrial product designers in designing mechanistic work processes that can help us to produce products consistently in an efficient manner. As these fall into place, it will open up opportunities for BUAN to participate as well.

9. What challenges are you facing in these two businesses?

Processes are at development and so personnel recognizes they have to learn to be creative and respond quickly to understand the long-term impact of decisions and their actions today. This requires extensive training from scratch to grow and fit in with the development of the organization else we lose efficiency. It is a learning curve for all. These present additional costs for the organization.

10. What can customers expect from you today?

For now, we do high-end quality seedling production for farmers and improve their average production capacity from the current one-hectare levels to four and beyond. We do this by improving the quality of their crops, reducing their reliance on chemicals, and with improved soils, improving their production margins. We also conduct development workshops on soil regenerative farming for clients.

In the past months, we had been working on listings of the curry puffs on the Yamee food delivery app (Google Playstore) so that customers get our food products delivered right to their doorstep. We are proud to announce the listing was launched in May this year and ordering us is now just a click away.

We also offer a unique finger food menu for boardroom meetings that carry our signature products. To try us, just order us on the Yamee.

11. What are your business’s future plans?

As our manufacturing systems gear up into place, the next step is to build franchises both for seedling production as well as the MFK franchise

12. Thank God it’s Friday, what are your plans for the weekend?

I will probably just relax.