After Office Hours with Grant Brooke

Anyone who has been through the Entrepreneurship journey will tell you that the journey is not easy. The companies that we revere are successful not because they started but because they failed on the way and learnt from the failures.

As an entrepreneur, the challenges that you are facing today are not unique to your company. From securing funds, to scaling down occasionally, cashflow management, sourcing talent; let’s face it, most entrepreneurs do not hit us with these hard truths, but they go through these challenges.

Take for instance a company like Cellulant, the CEO, Ken Njoroge once mentioned that they had to meet over 60 different investors in a two-year period that took up 400 pitches across the world to secure funding.

Twiga Foods on the other hand, secured its first funding in six months after they set-up their business, but still they were constantly short of capital and struggled to meet the rapidly growing demand.

Despite these challenges these two companies have survived the wave of time to become one of Africa’s most sought after. But the question to most entrepreneurs is do we get the whole entrepreneurship concept? Is there a manual to this? how far are we willing to go? and do we have what it takes to step up our game?

Join us for our next After Office Hours session with Grant Brooke, Executive Director at Twiga Foods, one of the fastest growing companies in East Africa as he shares his entrepreneurship journey on 6th June from 6.00pm to 7.00 pm on 7th Floor at Nairobi Garage Pinetree Plaza.

Grant, will share the Twiga Food story from a perspective that you have not heard before. Get to learn more on how he started his journey into entrepreneurship, how he met his co-founder Peter Njonjo, how the company got to scale-up fast, the hurdles the company had to jump, the lessons, the regrets and much more.

About Grant Brook

Grant Brooke is the Executive Director of Twiga Foods, a mobile-based, B2B platform used by small- and medium-sized businesses to purchase fruit and vegetable stock from local and regional farmers.

Currently, the company works with 5,226 vendors to source and deliver quality produce at fair prices. With the use of technologies such as Blockchain, Twiga Foods has emerged to become Kenya’s largest seller of bananas, potatoes, tomatoes, and other staple commodities.

Born in Texas, Grant Brooke found himself in Kenya during graduate school studying the impact of religion on economic choice-making in informal markets and spending a lot of time researching food vendors.

From there, he went to Oxford to pursue a doctorate on the subject. At Oxford, he met and became friends with Peter Njonjo, the former GM for Coca Cola in East Africa. The two began to discuss how they might apply Coke’s distribution model to produce, and from there Twiga was born.

Since the launch in 2014, Grant has led Twiga to being one of East Africa’s fastest growing enterprises, attracting top global investors, talent, development partners, and media attention in the likes of CNN, CCTV, Fast Company, and The BBC.

Twiga has also grown to be the largest supplier of fresh fruit and vegetables in Nairobi, with some 250 full-time staff, delivering to thousands of vendors a week.

By March this year Twiga Foods had reached the $30 million (Sh300 million)-mark in investment. In April, Twiga Foods, appointed the company’s co-founder Peter Njonjo to become the company’s CEO taking over from Grant Brooke.

Twiga Foods was also named among East Africa’s top ten tech companies to watch out for in 2019 by I-DEV International.

We regularly host thought-provoking and inspiring talks, skill-focused seminars and unique networking evenings designed to provide opportunities for professional development and creative growth. Get to know what events we have in the space here.