There are lots of ways to get food delivered to your doorstep; takeaways apps, supermarket deliveries and meal-kit services, to name a few. However, not every cuisine has an abundant number of doorstep options.
In the meal-kit industry, companies like Gusto and Hello Fresh offer hundreds of recipes. At Gusto, they offer recipes for 15 different cuisines including American, Asian, French, Italian, Indian and Turkish. However, there wasn’t a single recipe for African food on the site. Hello Fresh, one of the largest players in the meal-kit space, only featured three African items – one being a wine from South Africa. While these businesses have likely conducted robust research to understand what dishes their customers want, the lack of African meal options shows there is an untapped gap in the market.
“You have people making Chinese food working anywhere, you have Italian restaurants everywhere, you’ve got Ethiopian cuisines everywhere, but the one that’s difficult to find and not as exposed to the rest of the world is African food,” Akintunde Agbeja says.
Akintunde Agbeja is co-founder of Pika, an African meal prep service based in London. He says getting a homecooked African meal can be a challenging. “I live in London by myself and a lot of these things I’ve never cooked in my life.” A fan of Nigerian food, he used to order food a lot, but when the pandemic hit everything shut down, leaving him with one option.
“I tried to cook Nigerian food from scratch and ordered ingredients myself. I had a friend walk me through making a specific Nigerian meal, but I forgot so much stuff. It was a nightmare of a day. To make two dishes, it took me about eight hours.”
“If you learn from your mom or aunties, it’s not really a repeatable process,” says Agbeja. So he began to ask himself, “How can we standardise the process of cooking African meals so that it is repeatable?” This is how Pika was born.
As someone who lives alone Agbeja says he understands the struggles customers go through to secure a well-made cultural dish. “You either go to a restaurant, or if you find a recipe, you have the headache of trying to figure out where to buy the recipes. Then you have to figure out the ingredients and cook.”
To simplify this process, Pika houses over 60 recipes on its website with cooking instructions and nutritional and allergen information for each meal. Customers pick a set time and the box is delivered to their doorstep with all of the ingredients needed to make the meal. At the moment, most recipes are Nigerian based, but the company is looking to expand to include dishes from other parts of the African continent. According to Agbeja the demand for such an exapanison is there.
Their customers are a mix of people; recent African immigrants with a craving for a home cooked meal, young families, or even those who tried African food at a party and don’t want to wait until the next one for a plate of jollof. While there are African restaurants people can order from to get their fix, Agbeja explains that customers have told him that restaurants don’t always make food to their preferred taste and quality. Agbeja says customer appreciate the ability to make food their own way and quickly.
“One day a customer called me and she was like, ‘Hey, I made four boxes, within 30 minutes.’ I was impressed because normally if you’re going to do that from scratch, one of those boxes would take you about three hours.”
While the dominant players in the meal-kit industry might not be offering a range of African dishes, that isn’t stopping Agbeja. “I have decided to say, ‘Hey! We need to bring Africa to the world.”