Social entrepreneur Lufefe Nomjana’s business model is as fresh as the superfood he advocates. 



Creating a value chain to benefit business and residents in South Africa’s informal townships requires skill and perseverance, but that is the incredible success story of entrepreneur Lufefe Nomjana with his Spinach King franchise.



Nomjana has grown his business from an initial stake of R40 ($2), four bunches of spinach and the use of a neighbor’s oven in 2011, into a franchise operation that currently has five stores, and growing, and distributes products into selected retails outlets in the Western Cape and Gauteng provinces of South Africa.



And it is all built around the concept of nutritious eating and promoting a healthy lifestyle, something Nomjana believes is under-valued by township retailers. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;



“With Spinach King, we are not changing what people are eating, but providing a healthier version of it,” Nomjana tells FORBES AFRICA. “For example, our spinach bread, our green burgers and sandwiches.



“We are not saying to people, don’t eat burgers. We are rather saying when you do, have it inside a gluten-free spinach roll and with a spinach smoothie instead of a soft drink.



<div class="wp-block-image is-style-default"><figure class="alignright size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1-1024x823.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-48767" width="423" height="340" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1-1024x823.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1-300x241.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1-768x617.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1-1536x1234.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1-2048x1645.jpg 2048w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1-600x482.jpg 600w" sizes="(max-width: 423px) 100vw, 423px" /><figcaption>Spinach King supports small scale farmers. </figcaption></figure></div>



“People assume that healthy eating is not important to residents in the townships, but that is not the case at all. Attitudes are changing and people are seeking healthier options.”



After the instant success of the business, Nomjana was nominated by the United Nations for a scholarship at the University of Milan in Italy, where he enrolled for a course centered on nutrition and food sciences that he ultimately finished at the University of Cape Town.



It armed him with the skills to take his business to the next level, which was to open a retail outlet in Khayelitsha, Cape Town.



“It is a bakery from which we produce and supply our products, but also has a café and juice bar set-up for retail. That was in 2016 and it is still doing very well, even through these tough times with Covid-19.”



Soon afterwards, a Dutch student doing an MBA visited Cape Town and caught onto the concept, providing Nomjana with his first franchise opportunity.



“He loved it so much that he pitched it to the University of Amsterdam as an outlet for their students and we set that up in 2017. It was doing very well until Covid-19, when campuses were closed, but they pay royalty fees every six months and it has been a great learning curve to have the brand in another country.”



Nomjana also has an outlet at the Old Mutual head offices in Cape Town that service their 9,000 staff members, another success, and has just launched a fourth store in Philippi Village, also in the Mother City, a 6,000 square-meter business space where entrepreneurs can run their operations at a fraction of the cost of normal retail rental and overhead rates.



<div class="wp-block-image is-style-default"><figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2-1024x768.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-48768" width="424" height="318" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2-300x225.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2-600x450.jpg 600w" sizes="(max-width: 424px) 100vw, 424px" /></figure></div>



“We will be opening a fifth store in Langa (Cape Town) on September 24. That has been in the planning for two years, but is also a story that shows some of our challenges.



“All of our ingredients are organic and grown locally close to our stores. But for this, you need land and in Langa, it took some time to find the right space to grow our spinach and so on.



“Usually we speak to schools who have available land, or residents, who become part of our value chain.



“They grow the ingredients for us and we buy from them for our retail operations, but we also assist them in selling what we don’t use into retail stores. So it is a win-win, we get our ingredients at a good price, but we also help to keep our suppliers sustainable.



“We have got around 50 ‘gardens’ in the townships from where we source our ingredients directly and so this is a large value chain that not only benefits us as a business, but also the wider community.”



Nomjana has also recently developed a distribution warehouse and café in Maboneng, Johannesburg, from where he now sells his products into Spar, Wellness Warehouse and other outlets in Gauteng.



“That will keep us busy for the rest of 2020,” he says. “But in 2021, the plan is to grow into the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal [also in South Africa], they have great potential.



“And, of course, ultimately we would like to franchise this concept into Africa in the coming years. Where you have the space to grow vegetables, you can turn that into a thriving business. What we have done with Spinach King is proof of that.”



-By Nick Said

nicksaid

The Entrepreneur Who Started Out With $2 and Some Leaves

It all started with R40 ($4) and a neighbor’s oven. A year later, Espinaca Innovations is a bakery on a mission to make money by getting people in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape province to eat bread packed with spinach.
Espinaca, meaning spinach in Spanish, is where Nomjana bakes about 40 loaves and umpteen muffins every day. But the idea didn’t come by easily.
Nomjana started off selling clothes in his community of Khayelitsha, just outside Cape Town, to make a living. But he knew he needed something of his own, something innovative.
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A year before attending the Raymond Ackerman Academy, Nomjana decided to change his lifestyle and became a vegetarian. As he read a newspaper article about diabetic patients standing in long queues at hospitals, it spurred the spinach bread idea. It could be the answer for many people.
“I knew spinach was something that is a solution to my society due to the fact that it grows [all year], it’s versatile and it’s nutritious. I did my research, and found it was the most nutritious vegetable in the world,” adds Nomjana.
While attending the Academy, in partnership with the University of Cape Town, Nomjana was able to improve his entrepreneurial skills. The Academy is a post-matric level institution offering studies in entrepreneurial development.
Espinaca Innovations was a great idea on paper but implementing it proved to be a challenge. The only problem was that nobody was interested at the time.
“Eventually I just sat down and said let me use what I have and during that time I had nothing but the intellectual capital and $4 in my pocket. And I didn’t have an oven. I was living in a shack (a tin roof house) in a backyard with my wife. We were just dating at the time,” Nomjana says.
But he knew that he couldn’t operate this kind of business from a shack. So he asked a neighbor if he could bake bread in her oven when she was not using it.
In February last year, with his neighbor’s oven and R40 ($4), Nomjana sold about 200 loaves in 25 days. He grows the spinach in his backyard in about 20 crates and enriches the bread with it.
All good so far but Nomjana soon realized that he was not making enough money with the borrowed oven so he approached Pick ’n Pay (a grocery store owned by millionaire Raymond Ackerman) for assistance.
“That’s when they assisted with a four burner oven of my own I could use on a daily basis and at night as well. I spent my time baking lots of breads and going to the field and selling to people on the street, which I’m still doing now. Like going to train stations and selling door-to-door,” says Nomjana.
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The grocery store placed Espinaca Innovations into their small business incubation until it was big enough to become a supplier.
He now supplies the Pick ’n Pay head office canteen.
With the grocery store’s assitance Nomjana was able to bake more loaves but distribution became an issue as he was producing more bread than he could sell.
The solution was delivering bread on bicycles. He partnered with a crowd funding platform which helped to raise around R11,200 ($1,000) in two months. It enabled Nomjana to buy five bicycles to deliver bread.
Today, Nomjana has a wider range of spinach products, ranging from spinach muffins, sandwiches using the spinach bread, juices and smoothies.
These spinach products are sold and delivered to orphanages, pre-schools, and homes in Khayelitsha. He also supplies Spar, a grocery store chain, in Khayelitsha.
Nomjana will soon establish his own premises where he would be able to sell all his spinach products. He hopes to be able to turn the idea into a franchise across townships in the Western Cape.
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Tag: Lufefe Nomjana

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

The Entrepreneur Who Started Out With $2 and Some Leaves

On The Crust Of Something Big