What do you do when you stay six years without a job?
Lebogang Matsetse turned to what she knew best – cooking – to keep the fires burning at home.
With the rate of unemployment in Botswana at 20%, the 32-year-old is one of many young women who have turned to passion and entrepreneurship.
Matsetse started a catering company.
“I was literally tired of staying home doing nothing. It demotivated me and made me lose hope in life,” says Matsetse.
In September last year, she launched ChillieMama Catering Services. Operating from her home kitchen, Matsetse seems to have surely appealed to the taste-buds of her many different clients.
She may be rustling up the delicacies out of her kitchen stove, but Matsetse says her cuisine is classy.
“We take pride in the way we present it because we realized that is where most catering companies fail. Customers love well-presented food.”
Having grown up in an extended family in a township called Phiring in Broadhurst, Botswana, Matsetse learned it all from her grandmother.
“She was the extended family cook and nurtured me from as young as age five. By then I felt I was being overworked, little did I know she was preparing me for greater things as now cooking is what puts food on my table.”
The Bachelor of Arts Degree graduate with a major in English once tried teaching, but said she never enjoyed it, so quit.
“When I am cooking, I never feel tired. I literally cook every day and find joy in it and it somehow helps me unwind.”
Matsetse credits Facebook for most of her exposure and success.
“I never went around dropping my company profile to different companies and organizations. Every morning, I just upload pictures of the food I cooked on Facebook and will then receive calls from different companies requesting quotes. I believe the hard work I put in what I do speaks for me,” she says.
In March alone, Matsetse was able to make over P35,000 ($3,400) in profit. She believes it is not every day start-up businesses get big tenders and do well.
“My passion motivates me to put in more effort and I know this impresses my clients.”
With the business growing, Matsetse plans on finding a bigger space to operate from. She hopes to hire five more employees and intends taking her business to different parts of Africa.
“I want Africa and the rest of the world to know that great chefs can emerge from Botswana and I am the one to set that record and penetrate the international industry.
“Cooking is a craft that improves every single day and I plan to go to a culinary school to refine my skills,” she says.
Passion is the fire that keeps her dream alive, and her world of pots and pans busy. &#8211; Written by Gofaone Makhaya

Pots, Pans And Passion

Tolu Erogbobo is the latest sensation in the Nigerian gourmet scene, famed for creating delectable pastries, cookies and signature dishes for those who crave quality food in Lagos. He is popularly known as Chef Eros, named after the Greek god of love. His love for food means the 28-year-old chef counts billionaire tycoons Mike Adenuga and Aliko Dangote, as well as international stars like Lauren Hill, among his clients. It has also led to him being labelled as the next big thing to watch by CNN.
For Erogbobo it is surreal; he never planned to become a chef.
“When I started business I didn’t want to be a chef, I just wanted to be a restaurateur. I loved the restaurant business; I had worked on a few restaurant projects in my younger days. In the UK I worked with Oceania (Hotels )Group where they had set up a few restaurants in my university and just seeing the delivery of the equipment, putting them in place, making them work and designing a place to make it feel nice, was so exciting for me,” says Erogbobo, the Founder of Cookie Jar, a gourmet bakery.
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That was before Erogbobo had an unlikely experience in the kitchen.
“All of that switched in a year of me finding my true love, which is food. I found that through chicken; just seasoning chicken, putting the spices together, and then different cooking processes giving you different textures. I found the love for food in university then I combined that with the love for interior spaces, which is what drove the passion for the restaurant.”
After graduating in 2008 with a business degree from the University of Wolverhampton, in England, Erogbobo moved back to Nigeria with the plan to help his mother set up a restaurant.
It cost N60 million ($190,000) to start the first restaurant. Erogbobo was 21 years old at the time. His mother and sister put up a significant amount of the start-up capital.
“The funds for the restaurant were raised predominantly by my mother who sold one of her properties to invest. My sister supported with some her saving and so did I,” he says.
Erogbobo knew that location was key, however all the best locations in town came at a steep price. As luck would have it, he found a restaurant in Victoria Island whose owner was looking to sell and agreed to let the cash-strapped Erogbobo pay in monthly instalments.
“The owner said to me he didn’t want to sell the restaurant anymore because I didn’t have the money to buy it all at once, so he offered to be partners instead. So I came in, used the money I had to revamp the place from just a café to a café restaurant and that is how the journey actually started,” says Erogbobo.
The restaurant later failed because Erogbobo did not keep his eye on the numbers, according to the young entrepreneur. After a brief stint in real estate and energy, the calling of the kitchen could no longer be ignored.
“I started having dreams about cookies and they continued every other night. They were so vivid and I would wake up sometimes and I would be so emotional. In 2012, I got all the ingredients needed, went online, found the recipe I wanted and came back to bake. The first batch of cookies I made fell flat but they tasted really good. I went back and did more homework and I tried it out again, and it worked out. I went downstairs and gave my friends some to try and they all loved it. One of my friends offered to pay me and I didn’t know how much to charge so I said N500 ($1.50) per cookie and he didn’t object, so he bought four.”
Erogbobo realized he was onto something and needed to spread the word quickly.
“I started baking everyday and started posting pictures on [messaging app] BBM and I found out that BBM was working. So every time I would go out, I would get a lot of BBM contacts because I wanted them to see my updates and I used to update like every five minutes. It was annoying for a lot of people because you were always seeing me on your timeline but the moment you think of nibbling on something, the first thing you think of is me,” says Erogbobo.
Business soon took off. Aptly for someone called Chef Eros, Valentine’s Day came and Erogbobo sold over $2,500 worth of cookies over the love season and he has been on a trajectory ever since. The company is in its third year and currently turns over N150 million ($480,000) per year according to Erogbobo. The growth has been fast with three kitchens opened in Lagos, including Glasshouse Catering, which provides cocktail-style catering for events; Cookie Jar, which is the bakery and Eros and Gourmet, the speciality savoury dish brand.
As if his success wasn’t remarkable enough, this year Erogbobo was recruited by Food Revolution, the campaign started by culinary master Jamie Oliver. The celebrity chef launched the program to encourage people from all over the world to adopt a healthy eating lifestyle and push their own government to fight diet related diseases.
Joining the Food Revolution was a dream come true for Erogbobo. This year, he is gearing up to open a new catering service offering a 24-hour healthy breakfast menu for his clients.
“The Food Revolution is all about changing the way people eat, buy, grow, and what people understand about food. My global goal is zero hunger and for the next 15 years I aim to help end hunger in Africa. To do that we have to achieve sustainable agriculture, achieve improved nutrition and improved food security,” says Erogbobo.
With  Erogbobo’s passion for food, don’t bet against him.

The Man Who Knows  What Billionaires  Eat For Lunch

Friday, September 27, is “probably only the third time” in its history that Charly’s Bakery in Cape Town, South Africa, had run out of cupcakes.
Owner Jacqueline Biess shows no sign of exasperation, however. The combination of good weather and school holidays meant more people than usual were looking for a sweet treat. And even though some leave empty-handed, Biess knows another 2,000 freshly made cupcakes will be ready to go the next day.
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Baking starts at 10pm every night; someone is on shift at Charly’s for 21 out of 24 hours every single day. And cupcakes are not the only delights that emerge from its warm depths. A selection of cakes and pies has earned the bakery a reputation as one of the premier patisseries in the country.
The family business, started by husband-and-wife team Charly and Jacqueline Biess, is now run by Jacqueline and her daughters, Alex and Dani. And it has received rave reviews from the who’s who of Sout
h Africa’s foodie scene. They even have their own cooking show, Charly’s Cake
Angels, which airs locally and in
Europe, and will soon be breaking into the South American market.
All of this without a single advertisement. The Biesses started out with Charly’s baking skills, gleaned from a German baker in Swakopmund, Namibia, and Jacqueline’s head for business. Add to that a $15,000 loan from her parents, a second-hand car and a vision: “I knew what I wanted to create and I loved good food. I also knew success would only come from hard work,” Biess says.
Charly’s Cake and Coffee was successful because Biess trusted her ins-tincts. The coffee shop quickly became a pop-culture phenomenon and moved to Cape Town’s bustling V&amp;A Waterfront. A much larger premises, with hundreds more customers, the venture boomed. But with young children, the business became overwhelming and Charly and Jacqueline decided to downscale.
It was a move that was almost as risky as the decision to open the bakery in the first place, because they were giving up the security that came with success. But in 2009, in a 110-year-old building in the Cape Town city bowl, Charly’s Bakery was born again.
Six months earlier, in another of South Africa’s coastal cities, entrepreneur David Tedder had taken over Bread Ahead, a much-loved bakery in Durban’s Cowey Road. Previously owned by Retsol, the company behind Juicy Lucy and Milky Lane, the ba-kery was an established name with a loyal customer base. Tedder took the next step and franchised it, opening several smaller offshoots in shopping malls across Durban.
In the interim, he met, fell in love with and married television reporter Vanessa Govender. She fell pregnant soon after and gave up her job as a journalist. “I never wanted to compromise my pregnancy or motherhood,” she explains.
But the new Mrs. Tedder did want a career. After her son was born, she took charge of Bread Ahead’s cake division. Tedder has three designers working with her and they are putting their “personal stamp on Durban’s business scene”.
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Bread Ahead is all about personalized service. “Gone are the days of placing an order for a stock standard cake over the telephone. These days we encourage clients to have face-to-face consultations, where ideas are brainstormed to create cakes that are a work of art,” Tedder explains proudly.
Building relationships with clients is one of their policies, but the Tedders realized it was also why their expansion plans were failing. “Customer service and product quality were being compromised,” Tedder says, which prompted their decision to concentrate solely on the Cowey Road store.
While the Tedders decided to downscale to keep their clients close, further north in Johannesburg, where the impersonal is often expected, Linda Lipschitz’s baking hobby was outgrowing her kitchen.
Intricate decoration and delicate flavors made her speciality cakes a must-have on the menus of Joburg’s yuppies. So after three-and-a-half years
of working from home, Lipschitz open-ed Belle’s Patisserie.
“That day was very hard for me. I finally realized that I have a real business,” she recalls.
However, it is not all about store windows piled high with candy-colored delights. Behind the gloss and glamour are long hours and back-breaking work. “It’s not romantic. You have salaries, rent, wastage and lots of other operating costs,” Lipschitz points out. What may seem like a frivolous pastime is actually the result of a well-thought-out, strategic, business model.
For Biess, technology is key to promoting Charly’s Bakery. The store has more than 51,000 Facebook likes and over 16,000 followers on Twitter. She receives hundreds of emails a day and replies to every single one. The website is her only marketing tool.
“If you’re not online, you’re not in business. I advise any parent who wants to see their child open a business to get a high-speed internet connection and let them learn from what is out there,” she says.
Tedder spends most of her time maintaining the contacts she learnt to foster as a journalist.
“High priority is touching base with clients who have taken cakes the day before to find out if their functions and day went well, and most importantly, if the cake went down a treat,” she explains.
“I love interacting with people and so I never hesitate to keep those channels of communication open with customers. Just a simple courtesy call is the difference between them coming back to us or not.”
Lipschitz tries to introduce a new treat every month.
“It takes about that long to do product development and we make a lot of mistakes. But we don’t copy recipes. My head chef is very talented and finds it easy to develop his pro-duct,” she says.
There is nothing stereotypically feminine about these business models, but the perception that baking is a woman’s job remains, partly because of the high numbers of women in the industry.
Biess’s company has grown from 12 to 40 staff members, 70% of whom are women. But she recalls how one of her daughters, who was studying a Master’s degree at the time, would chide her for spending her free time baking cakes.
In fact, the kitchen work is only a small part of managing a bakery. Alex and Dani Biess took on more of a managerial role when their father passed away earlier this year.
Jacqueline spent most of her time at Charly’s side during his last few months, leaving her daughters to run the bakery.
“It was really very difficult for me to come back and the way the girls stepped up was amazing to see,” she says.
Tedder also depends on her girlfriends. Her pregnancy was difficult and her master bakers, who have been with Bread Ahead “almost as long as
it has been in existence”, carried a large part of the load.
“I am an empowered and emancipated woman who chose to put my child and husband first and above all else. The business of cakes is tailor-made to suit where I am,” Tedder says confidently.
Lipschitz also enjoys the flexible hours, which allow her to fetch her children from school. Although it does mean her workday can start at 6am at end at 1.30am the next morning. “But I love being at my store. It’s my safe space,” she says.
All three women acknowledge that being an entrepreneur is demanding, but that it has allowed them the freedom to live their lives on their own terms.
“I swapped the corporate world for this type of work so I have a career while I am incorporating the traditional family values that I grew up with,” Tedder explains.
“Plus, let’s face it, being your own boss is pretty awesome. Being the cake boss is even more awesome.”

Tag: Cooking

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Pots, Pans And Passion

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