In the latest episode of Connecting Africa, CNN’s Victoria Rubadiri visited the Africa Food Show in Cape Town, South Africa, the continents’ largest food show, to see how chefs are bringing their dishes to life.
The three-day event serves up the opportunity to immerse in African cuisine, with vendors using the opportunity to build relationships with consumers and distributors across the continent. Matt Denton, the president of DMG events, explains “This is one of those first stepping stones here to really internationalise the proposition for countries looking to enter the African market.”
For distributors, it’s about expanding their product line. UFS South Africa Marketing Lead, Yonela Motloung, tells Rubadiri that the event is, “Good partnerships from a root market perspective with local partners who are able to deliver with excellence that is really, really the solution and is regulatory.”
Unilever Food Solutions South Africa says it offers 130 products, with a goal to create a borderless African cuisine. According to Motloung, “People are getting the opportunity to taste the world right in their homes in Africa. We are talking street food couture, which is all about taking the normal street food and modernizing it and making it quite exciting in the last trend is culinary roots, which embraces our diversity as a continent and bringing that to life.”
For some chefs, a key ingredient to scaling their companies is partnering with programs like the Wakanda Food Accelerator. What they do, CEO Miles Kubheka tells Rubadiri, is “Find amazing food creatives, food and beverage creatives, and we essentially bulletproof them to make them superheroes. We take their products, or we help them with either marketing logistics, legal ops, whatever support they need, and then we help them scale.”
Speaking to Rubadiri, Kubheka describes the issue with food that is lost before it reaches the end consumer, “There’s no one railway system from Cape to Cairo, for example. And food, as you can understand is mostly perishable. So, you need a distribution channel. There’s still a massive inefficiency of moving food around. So that makes it harder if you’re a food creative to source or use ingredients from the rest of the continent. But I’m also super excited because that’s a fixable problem, that’s a logistics problem. And that one we can fix.”
Kubheka ends with a thought on how to get the rest of the continent to know where to come to showcase their products, “A show like this, the Africa Food Show, allows food creatives to have a hub in Inaba where they can come to one place and showcase their product and learn and communicate and share their lessons and experiences. And the reason why it’s called the Africa Food Show as opposed to the Cape Town Food Festival or the South African Food Show is because it was very intentional that this is about Africa.”
https://edition.cnn.com/business/markets/connecting-africa