STARTING AND RUNNING A BUSINESS AS A WOMAN
EKO FOOD
Christine Adeosun, CEO
My interest in food goes back to my childhood. My grandmother used to sell food in the local market, and my mother was a great cook too. We were a family of three girls and four boys, and my mother taught us all from very young that being able to cook for yourself is a vital life skill. She believed that if you can cook, you can make it in life. Home cooking can be cheaper and healthier – no junk food – and it teaches you self-reliance. That is something I have passed on to my own children as well.
I started cooking at a very young age, and gradually food became a passion for me. At college I studied biochemistry, and even as a student I began to cater for friends’ parties. My studies taught me more about the processes behind cooking and how you can scale the preparation of food from a small kitchen operation into something much bigger. One of the challenges of African cooking is that it is very time consuming and the preparation takes a long time. So we have a processing factory in London and Nigeria where a lot of our products are made. We developed a sauce that is the baseline for most African dishes, so you can get the authentic flavour but also save time – perfect for people who want to cook authentic African food but have busy lives. The sauce is now widely distributed both at home and overseas.
At the same time, I was learning about the aesthetics of food. For me, food should be a pleasure for all the senses, right down to the packaging and the décor of the shops where the food is sold; it is all part of the experience. When we got started, we were offering very beautifully packaged products that were quite different in look and feel from what people were used to. With our brown beans, for example, we took the trouble to remove the stones to make life easier for our customers, and that is still the essence of what we do. We make it easy for people to prepare and enjoy African food – no additives, no colouring, nothing unhealthy.
I do all my own research. I am always thinking about methods and ingredients and processes. One of the gifts that God has given me is that I only need to taste a dish once to be able to tell what is in it. I love excellence, and I am always looking around, trying and testing new things to see how we can do even better to improve the quality of the end product. As I always say in my cooking shows, you are what you eat, and I have shown that high quality food can still be an affordable value for customers.
I started my first company in Nigeria when I was 19. It was called Collars Nigerian Ltd. It was set up to offer a wide range of business lines. Then, when I got to university, I catered for parties for friends. I would ask friends to help me serve at these private dining events, and the business took off by word of mouth.