Ikenna Nzewi: Leveraging technology to change Africa’s food processing narrative

Many entrepreneurs are driven by a passion to solve societal problems. For Ikenna Nzewi, chief executive officer and co-founder of Releaf, his driving force is to use technology to address issues faced by Africa’s food processing factories.

Through Releaf – an ag-tech startup, Ikenna, and his co-founders have created a technology that makes smallholder farmers and food factories more efficient and profitable.

A business he started as an undergraduate with his two cousins and Uzoma Ayogu, develops proprietary hardware and software solutions to drive industrialisation in food processing across the continent.

Releaf’s hardware increases the availability of quality raw materials for food factories and its sourcing software connects directly to over 2,000 stallholder farmers.

Currently, the young entrepreneur is seizing opportunities in the Nigerian oil palm industry with the technology that Releaf offers.

Read Also: Food, transport costs squeeze life out of Nigerians

The computer-scientists-turned-entrepreneur was inspired to establish Releaf in 2017 to help food factories secure adequate quality agricultural raw material.

“We spent some time investigating opportunities to develop technology to catalyze industrialization in the value chains we explored,” he says.

“After several months of trading various agricultural commodities, we discovered that the biggest challenge food factories faced was securing enough quality raw material to meet their needs,” he says.

Ikenna and his other co-founders, boostrapped the business with personal funds and prizes monies gotten from their campus entrepreneurship programmes – MIT Lagatum, Yale’s Tsai Institute among others.

The Yale graduate says Releaf was admitted into the Y Combinator’s summer 2017 accelerator programme which came with a $120,000 investment immediately after their undergraduate studies.

Since starting, the business has grown steadily and has built a network of food factories and working with over 2,000 farmers. Also, the business currently has 70 full-time employees.

The young entrepreneur says Releaf was greatly impacted by the disruptions on the supply chain caused by the lockdown measures to contain the virus outbreak.

“The restrictions on movement both globally and locally made the importation of machinery, movement of raw material, and team coordination more difficult,” Ikenna says.

“The pandemic has also accelerated food inflation, which makes life more difficult for consumers. The average Nigerian currently spends around 60percent of their income on food, compared with Americans who spend 10percent.”

He urges the government to fix the issue of escalating food prices in the country to increase consumers’ purchasing power and drive more robust growth.

On strategy the business adopted to survive the difficult moment of the pandemic, he says Releaf started most of its operations remotely and this made it easier for the business to adapt to the new normal created by the pandemic.

“The seamless adaptation also made it easier for us to coordinate as a team to address the other challenges that the pandemic presented and put solutions in place,” he adds.

He notes that the business plans to expand its operation in the oil palm industry across the West African coast in the short run and expand into other commodities for a continental footprint.

In the long run, the business plans to build decentrailised factories to power the Africa food processing industrialisation. Evaluating Nigeria’s food industry, he says enormous opportunities abound.

“From farming and logistics to pre-processing and manufacturing, there are many opportunities to drive changes across the industry,” he notes.

He states that lack of innovation and industrialisation has made the country unable to fully harness opportunities in the sector.

He cites an example using the country’s oil palm industry, saying with technological solutions to boost farmers’ productivity and increase their efficiency.

According to him, the biggest opportunities in the country’s agricultural sector lie in technology and innovation as direct value chain participants rather than attempting to re-engineer the system via other players (which has been the dominant and largely unsuccessful approach to African agtech for some time).

He says building the framework to power the change they ought to see from scratch remains the biggest challenge confronting the business.

“Given that our technology is proprietary and large parts of the agriculture sector are yet to be industrialised, one of our biggest challenges is building the framework to power the change we want to see from scratch,” he says.

“Our work involves a lot of research and development and despite the due diligence we have in place, it can often be difficult to ascertain whether or not these machines will work as we would like them to until we have them on the ground,” he adds.

He calls on the government to bridge the country’s huge infrastructural gaps to reduce businesses production costs.

Ikenna says he is excited that Releaf was listed among the top 50 Africa’s Business Heroes finalists by the Jack Ma Foundation.

“We were chosen from more than 12,000 entries and selected by a pool of more than 200 judges,” he states.

“It is a great endorsement of what we are trying to achieve at Releaf and a lot of the credit for that accolade has to go to our wonderful team because of the role they play in bringing the vision to life,” he says.

On his advice to other young entrepreneurs, he says spend more time on-ground understanding the current realities before getting involved in any sector.

“There is no substitute for investing time and effort into knowing what is going on in any market before you dive in. Avoid blind technology transfer from the West because solutions that may work elsewhere don’t match our realities here,” he says.