Recy Foods

Recy Foods is a street food delivery service that is reinventing the way street food is prepared in our cities. It tackles the problem of low quality nutritional and hygienic conditions currently rampant in the street food market in Nigeria and Africa. It addresses the problem using a micro-franchise approach that leverages existing supply chains to aggregate locally produced food in urban slums and employ a network of local entrepreneurs to sell this food as clean, complete and delicious meals.

In many parts of the world, particularly in the developing countries, street food vending also makes an important contribution to employment, household revenue and food security. While street foods are an important source of ready-to-eat nutrition and provides low cost meal for the urban poor population, the health risks possessed by such foods may outweigh their benefits. Lagos city is one of the most densely populated cities of the world. At present Lagos is the residence of approximately 21 million people and it has been estimated that there are around 3 million street food vendors currently engaged in food vending in the city. over 70% of people rely on the informal street food economy as both a source of income and meals. Four key roadblocks prevent these underserved, urban communities from accessing clean, nutritious foods on a regular basis and vendors from providing them – high food prices, broken line in nutritional education, poor sanitation, and a broken supply chain. Despite all the major advances in supply chain management and technology in recent years, street food vendors and their suppliers still don’t have a single, unified, real-time view of supply and demand when working together in an extended enterprise.  

Recy Foods' goal is to improve market conditions for street food vendors and street food quality for consumers. Our primary beneficiaries are urban families in major cities and the food vendors who serve them, where the informal food system has failed to keep pace with the needs of neighbourhoods booming with rural migrants.  Our model is built to ensure strong earning potential for participating vendors by tightly controlling costs, and to maximize profit retained by communities by decentralising production facilities to the neighbourhood level. Smallholder farmers also secure stronger access to market through our significant purchasing power. 

Recy Foods franchising business model provides an integrated solution for urban slum populations by addressing each of the aforementioned root causes of malnutrition.  

1. Recy Foods makes nutritious food affordable at the same cost as other street food by leveraging economies of scale from local suppliers.  

2. Recy Foods creates jobs through community cooking hubs, trains women entrepreneurs through the food cart distribution system, and provides nutritional education to all consumers.  

3. Recy Foods also provides business, nutrition, and sanitation training to all employees and franchisee, ensuring consistent quality control from harvest to consumption.  

4. Recy Foods connects the supply chain from local producers to end consumers, eliminating unnecessary middlemen. 

Recy Foods in contrast to other food service providers like Majekodunmi, Aribike, etc addresses a large loop hole in the marketplace through sale of an excellent  food that prevent chronic malnutrition.  In addition, Recy Foods solves supply chain, food waste and sanitation issues by aggregating local produce and converting it into nutritious meals. While there are many local organisations, they often are missing links to markets which Recy Foods provides. Recy Foods focuses on creating sustainability by considering food production from the farm to the plate. This model ensures we are able to join in the efforts of others within the surrounding area and leverage our strengths for the benefit of all. 

At the heart of Recy Foods is a user-friendly tech enabled integrated solution providing automated services like Point of sale payments, purchase orders and invoices, as well as communications tools. Recy Foods combines a variety of technologies to achieve this goal of making clean and affordable meal available to local communities. Our main goal is to reduce the spread of diseases, which result from eating foods that's been contaminated with things like E. coli and cholera and typhoid. And we think we can help prevent some of these illnesses from even happening. Our ultimate target is to meet the food needs of the at least half of the 50 million people in urban slums of West Africa by 2024. 

Due to a large-scale migration of rural people to urban areas street food vending has become a growing informal sector in the urban areas in many countries in Africa, including Lagos. With street food representing 85% of some household food purchases, the public health crisis from unsafe street food is rampant throughout Africa. As part of our pilot research, our team completed a survey of 500 vendors, 500 street food consumers. 76% of consumers listed “quality” as their first priority in seeking a street food vendor, and 74% listed hygienic conditions as their second. Recy Foods is bridging planet and prosperity by building distribution for one of the world's most proven and resource-efficient nutrition methodology. Expanding our model at scale will position us as a major influencer in the global effort to create sustainable food systems. Despite informal food being Africa's largest consumer market at over USD $100 billion annually, few companies are using this buying power to help Africans create a modern and sustainable informal food system that delivers prosperity for all. By placing sustainable food systems for all at the core of our mission, we can be a powerful force for good in the struggle African nations face to enhance food security and diet quality without surrendering their fate to big agriculture. 

PRESENT IMPACT

1. 10 Vendors in 10 locations

2. 50,000 meal served to date

GROWTH PLAN

2019: 100 Vendors/Provide 200,000 meals every month

2020: 200 vendors/Provide 500,000 meals every month

2024: 1500 vendors/Provide 3,000,000 meals every month 

Our goal is to improve the quality of global street food for consumers, and market conditions for sellers. By leveraging local resources and partners across geographies. We have our eyes set on spreading to the 36 states in Nigeria within the coming year, while carefully working on our strategy to scale to other countries such as Ghana, Cameroun, Rwanda, and Kenya. We would like to improve food security for slum communities by improving access to nutritious food. Food security is closely tied to development and the ability to break the poverty cycle for those living in urban slums. Our ultimate goal is to scale and work with more communities to improve access to fresh and nutritious food and use community restaurants as 'hubs' that promote education on smart farming, good nutrition to boost resilience to the effects of climate change on slum areas. 

The major barrier to Recy Food is lack of sufficient funding to aid our expansion plans/government interference. Our franchising phase of the innovation as begun, and aims to build 500 Recy Foods franchise in 3-5 years serving at least 4M people. We will extend Recy foods to all states in Nigeria and beyond (projected at 1500 units for 2024. This would mean that Recy Foods would be serving over 10 million slum residents through its food supply system beyond 2024. To accomplish this expansion, we will require a capital investment of $500,000. This will cover 5 years of our operating expenses. Once our expanded franchise are generating income, our projects will be self-sustainable and capable of covering the capital costs for constructing more units. 

As outlined above, our greatest barrier to success is government interference and inadequate space/funding. We believe the first is being overcome by our team by ensuring we keep government agencies abreast of the social benefits of the sector, and creating an environment of trust with policy makers. The later issue is an execution concern, since we believe we provide a market for both entrepreneurs and investors that seek them; and creating the platform will be profitable in the long term as global investors are increasingly interested in Africa based ideas. Our infrastructure barrier can however be overcome by the help of our friends and well wishers; organisations like MIT Solve that want to partner with us for change!

Full time staff: 5

Parttime staff:3

Contract staff: 20

We have a very strong team that is passionate about the solution we provide, and we have a market that is ready and ripe for our solution. Our main competencies are in logistics, food engineering, supply chain management, and community management. As a core team of diverse individuals, each one bringing unique & complementary skills & experiences to the table, this combination of talent, expertise, high tolerance for ambiguity dedication & determination to impact on the communities we serve & ability to take risks & experiment with new ideas are our greatest strengths. The values we share create a diversity that shall bring the best innovation. Our ability to relate to a wide array of people have empowered us with critical perspectives to impact on human development. We believe in long-term involvement, honest feedback on personal performance to take corrective actions and leverage each other's expertise. We'll continually create out-of-the-box ideas without being locked into the perceived existing solutions. 
 

Recy Foods' model is financially sustainable as we directly make money from the sales of clean and affordable food which is a huge market in Africa.. Each food cart has the capacity to sell meals at 15-19% margin which covers cart operations. Example: A network of 5 franchise can potentially generate collectively US$5,000 monthly. To generate more income, we will enlist more people as a franchisee for our services. This will allow us to get more income and to cover the institutional costs to maintain Recy Foods as a central financial, support, and institutional organisation. 

We will fund our work via revenue generation.

Immediately Plan: Contract sales through schools, markets and worksites. Increase meal production capacity by franchising other local meal producers (controlled through accreditation program)  

Long term Plan: 3 to 5 year geographic scaling to other cities in Nigeria (Abuja, Ibadan, Ilorin, Abeokuta, Kano, Kaduna etc), secure second African country, Cameroon or Ghana.  

Our goal is to gain mentorship, technology partnership, and investment support. We believe that the MIT Solve is the best platform for us to gain this support. We can further our current progress under the guidance of the MIT Solve team in refining and polishing our curricula and in making our model more human-centered. We hope to leverage experts within the network to create a more efficient, scalable, and sustainable model. Finally, we hope to benefit from the MIT Solve’s global network, with which we can exchange insights/ideas and spread the word about our venture. 

Recy Foods is primed to scale from 2 cooking center with 10 carts to 4 cooking sites and a fleet of 50 food carts. Scaling throughout Nigeria in 2019- to 5 additional cities. The Healthy Cities Prize will provide the funding necessary to continue developing a nutritious menu with margins for our vendors, building food carts to create jobs for unemployed women, and finalize curriculum for our certification course so vendors all over Nigeria and eventually Sub-Saharan Africa, can provide consumers with superior street food. 

Street vending provides a means of economic development and provides jobs which help alleviate poverty. An advantage of street-food vending is that it may be a source of inexpensive nutritional food while it is also a source of income for the poor. However, if this enterprise is not handled correctly it may have dire consequences in terms of health and hygiene. For instance, without proper guidance to food vendors this may result in food poisoning for the consumers.  

Using the Recy Food Model, we empower women in cities to be Recypreneurs through our certification program.  Potential candidates are selected through community information sessions, women groups and community-based organisations. New Recypreneurs are connected to our central training and production facility where they receive training in on sanitation, nutrition, business management, IT, family nutrition and financial literacy.  Recypreneurs are provided with their own supplies, and most importantly guaranteed 24/7 support.  Our goal is to enrol 100 women into our pipeline in the next 6 months. We believe the Innovation for Women Prize would give us the enablement to train these women and enrol them into our pipeline.