It was tough on a lonely farm in the tiny town of Molteno in South Africa’s Eastern Cape in 1940. The world was at war and South Africa was staggering from the great depression.
On this windswept property, the farmer’s wife had an idea to make money for her family. Elizabeth Anne Greyvensteyn wanted to bake biscuits to sell to her friends at church and on neighboring farms. The only problem was she didn’t have any money to convert her barn into a bakery.
So the farmer’s wife sought a £1,500 loan from a new unknown government agency. Three quarters of a century later both lender and lendee are household names.
The loan to the farm near Molteno was the first issued by the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) that celebrated 75 years of operation in October. From Greyvensteyn’s bakery emerged the huge brand name Ouma rusks. The company expanded down the years into a conglomerate and formed a partnership with Simba, a popular potato chips manufacturer.
For the IDC, this was the first of a multitude of loans that built scores of Johannesburg Stock Exchange companies and created hundreds of thousands of jobs.
“Sasol was established in 1950 with an initial capital investment by IDC of R10 million ($700,000) after many years of research on the viability of using South Africa’s abundant low-grade coal resources as sources of liquid fuels. The company produced its first synthetic fuels and chemicals at its plant in Sasolburg in 1955. The NATREF refinery, a joint venture with Total, started producing fuel in 1971 and Sasol II commenced operation in 1983. The company privatized and was listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1979,” says Mandla Mpangase, the IDC public relations manager.
Today, Sasol is an Africa-based company leading the technology innovations around the world. This sought after petrochemical giant is actively involved in gas-to-liquids (GTL) technology, using the natural gas to boost innovations and resourcefulness by creating liquid fluids such as diesel and kerosene.  On the FORBES Global 2000 list, ranking the world’s largest public companies, Sasol is ranked 366 and is valued at $21.9 billion.
Over the years, IDC expanded its mandate to lend support to companies beyond South African borders, starting with Mozal, Mozambique’s aluminium smelter, in 1998.
With the 2008/09 global financial crisis, again IDC was prompted to draw up schemes to finance and create jobs for companies in distress.
According to Chief Executive Officer Geoffrey Qhena, the aim of the IDC interventions was only to ensure companies stayed afloat, but also that they grew.
A company born during the apartheid regime, IDC has transformed to serve all in business. Qhena highlighted this at the 20 years celebration of South African democracy in 2014.
“The corporation made sure that companies improved capacity levels and become competitive on the world market. We also focused on developing black industrials. So far, we have spent R4.8 billion ($338 million) to fund black businesses in the in the last 20 years… In the last three years, we have approved 22 projects with a commitment of R13 billion ($900 million),” he said.
So what started with a rusk biscuit on a dusty farm 75 years ago is just getting into its stride.

An Investment Story That Took The Biscuit

Kitted out in worker boots, hard hats and blue overalls, Iman Mkwanzi and Nene Mboweni are demolishing stereotypes. The owners of Mkweni Groundworks – a construction company specializing in general building, road signage, landscape and horticulture – are glass ceiling-crashers.
Mkwanzi and Mboweni began looking at different avenues for a new business, and discovered a trend – women were thriving in construction.
Inspired by them  making their mark in a male-dominated sector, they decided to get their hands dirty.
“We actually wanted to be in worker boots. We weren’t really fazed by project management, we felt like we needed to change the dynamic a bit and get in there…From the beginning, we’ve had funny reactions,” says Mboweni.
“You’ve got to be street smart – working from the ground upwards. If you know what the dynamic is at the bottom, understanding the dynamic at the top is easier. We’re trying to bring a fresh new mentality into it because there’s huge problems in this industry and enterprises have dominated and monopolized a space. The bigger enterprises grow, you lose contact with the ground but we’re in touch with it,” says Mkwanzi.
Mboweni studies medicine and runs a baking business, Nnüa; Mkwanzi works as a model and has just completed her degree in medical microbiology. For the duo, every day is labor intensive. Their new venture often involves breaking down glass walls and stereotypes.
“It’s male-dominated but if you’re assertive as a woman, you’re just as powerful,” says Mboweni.
“I’ve had stereotypes thrown at me my entire life. I’ve never cared and I’m not going to start caring about other people’s negative opinions – that just brings you down. We’re going to focus on the positive,” says Mkwanzi.
Constructing buildings and building careers – Mboweni and Mkwanzi are on their way up.

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Wearing Multiple Hats

Chef Vicky Gurovich simply loves what she does.
“It was meant to be. I love eating and I love feeding people. I get to do that everyday&#8230;I think I am pretty lucky,” she says.
She started young, growing up in a kitchen filled with women who were “great cooks”. Weekends were spent in the kitchen baking, with each creation more ambitious than the last.
“I think I made quite a mess, I always had rather ambitious goals in mind when I was baking as a youngster.”
Messy beginnings aside, she has had to hone her craft through her education and her time in celebrated kitchens. She studied food theory at the WITS Tech Hotel School in Johannesburg, her hometown.
“We studied the theory behind what we were cooking&#8230;we got a very good classic base which was good to build on because you understand the basics properly.”
She then took a leap, moved from Johannesburg and made her start in the industry at the four-star Shrigley Hall Hotel, an English countryside retreat. It wasn’t the life of grandeur and sophistication she imagined when she was a student but it was an important step, she says.
“I moved in a different direction but I learnt how to work quickly&#8230;it was a good first job. You walk out of hotel school with these delusions of grandeur but you get down to peeling potatoes and moving out mise en place at a rapid pace.”
It was after that first job that she took an interest in pastry-making. She got in touch with the pastry chef at the Michelangelo Hotel, in the heart of Sandton in Johannesburg, and found a way into his kitchen.
“I worked for free for about three months&#8230;I just wouldn’t leave.”
She didn’t, she joined the pastry department at the hotel for over a year.
That was the catalyst for her impressive career in pastry. She moved to the historic Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town and made her mark there, twice. Gurovich then returned to Johannesburg to lead the pastry department at the Saxon, a luxury mainstay in the city. She even won the Huletts Pastry Chef of the Year Award along the way.
Today, she leads the same department at the glittering new Four Seasons Hotel The Westcliff, perched on the hills of southern Johannesburg. She is excited about her new challenge.
“I think going forward, it’s going to be very interesting,” she says.

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The Sweet Life

It was a 180 degree turn. One minute Tayrene Mugridge was modeling on catwalks in Milan, Japan, the United States and Belgium; the next she was baking bread.
It all began when she was a toddler, when her late grandmother baked beer bread every Sunday.
“I used to be with granny and I’d say ‘granny, can I please pour the beer?’ It was a ‘you fight over it with your sister’, kind of thing,” says Mugridge.
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“I used to make this as Christmas presents back in the day in a glass jar, with a ‘Happy Christmas’ label and a picture of a cat. All the ladies got a brownie mix and all the boys got a beer bread mix.”
The origin of the recipe is obscure. What is clear is that it was passed on from grandmother to Mugridge’s mother and then to Mugridge herself. It was she who vowed to turn the bread into a business. It was an idea that Mugridge came up with while making herself up for modeling.
Modeling was her life nearly a decade ago. After completing high school, she left for the fashion shows of the world—and all the lights and glamour that goes with it. When she returned to South Africa, with no university education, modeling was her only way to make a living.
She was worn-out by life on the catwalk, so she started a model booking agency which she ran for around eight years. But she grew tired of the business as well.
“I came home one day and said I was sick of it. I asked my fiancé if I could quit my job and he said, ‘yes, go for it’. And then I said, ‘but what am I going to do?’ And he said, ‘well, do the beer bread’. I looked at him and asked him if he was crazy. Who wants to buy beer bread? This was something I did on the weekends; I didn’t think it could be a career. And then it was,” she says.
It took two months without a paycheck to nudge Mugridge into giving the beer bread business a chance. The recipe was there, the flavors could be added. All that was left was the packaging and six months later she launched Barrett’s Ridge Beer Bread in August 2012.
“It has just taken off. I thought I’d be sitting at markets on the weekends begging people to buy my bread, but it’s going well,” she admits.
“I sent out a couple of drop boxes to some of the bloggers, I took it to some of the delis and orders started coming in. I got the website, Facebook and Twitter up and running, which is a great way of advertising, especially when you’re starting out and can’t afford marketing.”
Three months after launching Barrett’s Ridge Beer Bread, Mugridge received a message from an online kitchen store, Yuppiechef, via Twitter. They were starting a pantry section on their website and wanted to sell her beer bread.
Yuppiechef’s first order was quite small, Mugridge says, but then they asked for around 800 units.
“I managed to give them 400 loaves. I then called them and said I was sorry and would give them the other half later during the following week,” she remembers.
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At the time, Mugridge was doing everything on her own, with the help of her fiancé. She made the beer bread mix, cut the material, stitched the packaging by hand and folded labels from her house. But this was a sign that she couldn’t do all the work alone.
As the orders increased, she outsourced the work to Zimele Packaging Solutions where they mixed the ingredients and did the packaging. This enabled Mugridge to focus on the management side of the business.
Today, without any marketing and just her website and social networking sites, Barrett’s Ridge Beer Bread is exported to Namibia and Australia and exporting over two tons to Britain in December. The bread is mostly sold at delis and some grocery stores in South Africa.
“I didn’t really realize how powerful social media was until I started tweeting and Facebooking… the distributor from Namibia found us on Facebook and she was coming to Cape Town to meet some of her suppliers. So she popped in for a meeting and we took it from there,” Mugridge says.
Some people complain that the bread is salty.
“Then I ask them, ‘what beer did you use?’” she says. The beer changes the flavor of the bread.
A simple recipe from her grandmother has helped Mugridge become a successful beer bread baker. It turns over around R150,000 ($14,000) a month.
“I asked my mom, ‘do you think granny would mind if I’m making money off her idea?’ She said ‘No, not at all. Not if you pay for me to go on a nice holiday.’”
And that’s the way the beer bread crumbles.

Tag: Baking

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

An Investment Story That Took The Biscuit

Wearing Multiple Hats

The Sweet Life

From Top Model Gear To Baking With Beer