About the company
Gaea Foods Limited is a Kenyan women-led enterprise and a frontier company in the potato processing space. We work with hotels and restaurants and catering institutions to provide consistent and high quality potato cuts. We closely collaborate with potato farmers, for whom we create an economic impact as off-taker of their produce.
Every cloud has a silver lining, AGRF, in its timing and content, is the silver lining in the cloud of COVID Phenomena.
Roseanne Wanjiku Mwangi, Director- Corporate Affairs
Their Agribusiness Dealroom experience
We came to the AGRF Dealroom 2020 seeking capital to grow within the potato space by improving the sourcing of raw materials to a level that would support an efficient running of the processing plant, and enable the development of new products through processing line investment for the retail/B2Cmarket that remains largely underserved.
What worked
Seeking a mixture of debt and equity investments for the larger part, participation in the Dealroom gave Gaea Foods the visibility required to engage top investors who also gained confidence to deal with Gaea Foods as one of the dealroom companies. The Agrf agribusiness Dealroom was in this sense, great matchmaking platform, bringing potential companies and investors together, to be able to talk to each other.
What I learnt, what can be done to improve
AGRF took place right in the eye of the COVID storm and the conversations around the Dealroom, the various discussions on other plenary sessions and the individually curated meetings that were made possible thru the online reach-out and chat platforms have in retrospect, been excellent resources that helped sharpen the edge of the business by gaining insights into areas of continued improvement, possible engagement and new business areas. The macroeconomic challenges brought about by COVID have only begun being truly felt, and the hospitality industry as many other sectors of the economy, has suffered significantly. During this slump, Gaea Foods took to pivot towards developing the farms for steady food production, and we have held onto the resolve of developing the farm’s full spectrum, embracing the circular economy inherent in production and processing, even as we seek new ways of marketing the produce.
The AGRF’s conversations are now taking form, and are proving to be the beacon of hope that the sun will shine again. Support to agribusinesses that slumped during the covid phenomenon, the provision of linkages with finance to bridge this chasm provides confidence that things will spring back even as the sector walks towards defining what the new normal will be.
Roseanne Wanjiku Mwangi, Director- Corporate Affairs