In Day 1–1000, we follow founders through the raw, unfiltered journey of company-building: the early scrambles, the quiet breakthroughs, the painful pivots, and the milestones that shape what a business becomes. This goes live on Saturdays by 2 PM WAT.
The acrid sting of rotten tomatoes. The musty gutters running behind stalls. The sharp tang of fresh vegetables packed in raffia baskets. These smells—unmistakable and inescapable in Nigerian open-air markets—are etched in the memory of Olapeju Umah, co-founder of grocery delivery startup MyFoodAngels.
An electrical-electronics engineer who never held a 9-to-5, Umah has spent the past decade iterating on one obsession: making good quality food cheaper and easier to access for the average Nigerian family.
The idea took shape in 2014 when her family moved from the Lagos mainland to Ajah, a remote neighbourhood on the island. “The cost of food was insane,” she recalls. “I’ve always bought in bulk, so I just kept going to Mile 12 once a month.” That journey was a 1 hour 26 minutes commute (40.8 km)
Those grocery runs soon became something more. Neighbours—mostly busy professionals—began asking her to pick up food staples for them for a fee. The informal service grew organically. By 2018, Umah formalised it as Mile12 Market Woman, a small team that delivered groceries from the mainland to homes and restaurants on the island.
Then came COVID.
Day 1–100: Structure through chaos
With lockdowns and market closures, demand surged. Umah’s pre-COVID groundwork gave her a head start, and the service quickly became a lifeline to households and restaurants.
While orders surged, Umah observed a sharp decline in the food quality the team sourced in open markets. Profit margins she had once relied on were quickly eroded by Nigeria’s relentless food inflation, which has been a major driver of the country’s headline inflation.
Like every founder, Umah faced the classic dilemma: pivot or perish.
She chose the former. By 2021, the company had rebranded to MyFoodAngels, and they began sourcing food items directly from farmers, which was 15-20% cheaper than buying from open markets.
“We had to start from scratch,” she tells me.
The rebrand came with product confusion, organisational shuffles, and a fundamental shift in how customers and staff interacted with the company.
Before the rebrand, the company had operated their entire operation on WhatsApp, handling both orders and transactions on the platform. However, with its growing user base, WhatsApp become unsustainable. As part of its rebrand, the company introduced a website and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to help optimise orders and delivery.
But technology doesn’t solve everything. The bigger challenge was behavioural. Customers, long accustomed to the intimacy and immediacy of ordering on WhatsApp, were now required to order on a website. The transition was anything but smooth. To onboard reluctant customers, MyFoodAngels staff manually created user profiles, migrated WhatsApp customers onto the web platform, and filled carts individually. The team also offered web-only discounts to incentivise customers to join.
As customers began adopting the website for deliveries, the ERP system ran into some issues. “The ERP system wasn’t optimised. It kept pulling billing addresses instead of delivery addresses. That meant a customer in Ikeja would order delivery to Ikoyi—and we’d go to the wrong location.” Umah recounted. “It was chaotic, but we stayed the course.”
As customers adopted the website for ordering, MyFoodAngels also had to make several adjustments to aid the transition. For instance, on the website, users could only place orders by specifying quantities in kilograms (for example, “tomato 1kg”). This starkly contrasted with the WhatsApp experience, where customers simply gave a price estimate for what they wanted. To solve this, MyFoodAngels launched a “name your price” feature to replicate the WhatsApp-style budgeting system.
Another pain point was repeat ordering. Many customers placed the same monthly orders on WhatsApp, making reordering effortless. However, this convenience was missing from the website at launch. MyFoodAngels later rolled out a “re-order” feature, enabling users to repeat previous orders with a single click quickly.
Even packaging became a battleground. Umah recalls one early customer used to Mile12 Market Woman’s rustic deliveries: “She called me, furious. She said, ‘Where did you buy this from? Why does it look so neat? I want a refund!’ She didn’t believe we bought it from the market. She thought we went to a supermarket.” That customer is still with the company to date.
One major lesson from that phase: data is oxygen. At Mile12 Market Woman, everything lived in WhatsApp threads or the founder’s memory. There was no customer history, no order records, and no clarity. “Now, every decision is backed by data. From pricing to product packaging to tech features—we collect and analyse everything.”
While MyFoodAngels addressed all of its product bottlenecks, its internal culture needed attention. Early hires from the Mile12 Market Woman era struggled to adapt to a tech-enabled business. “Some staff just couldn’t transition. They weren’t getting it—even after training. We had to let them go. We started hiring for competence, not convenience,” Umah recounts.
Day 101–1000: The challenges of being bootstrapped
After its rebrand, MyFoodAngel’s first moment of validation came after it onboarded its first 1,000 customers. The company also onboarded some large restaurant chains after that.
While its rebrand to MyFoodAngel addressed its quality control issue and brought some structure to the business, its next growth phase focused on streamlining its supply chain from procurement to logistics. Besides directly taking goods from farms, MyFoodAngels purchased land and began farming its produce.
The company, which had previously mainly depended on third-party logistics providers, began investing in its fleet of delivery vans. This strategic move granted MyFoodAngels greater control over delivery schedules, service quality, and operational efficiency—critical factors in scaling a food supply business. However, this approach contrasts with the asset-light models typically favoured by many venture capitalists, who often prefer businesses that minimise capital expenditure and operational complexity
MyFoodAngels is currently profitable. While the business has primarily been bootstrapped, it has received some help. It got a ₦2 million ($1,260) grant from Flourish Africa in 2022, ₦10 million ($) from GETAccelerated in 2023, and over ₦1 million ($630) from the GITEX Dubai Female Founders and Funders Program in 2024.
Being a bootstrapped business has come with its own set of challenges. For one, the company hasn’t grown as fast as it wanted to. The company’s marketing spend has been lean and leaned into word-of-mouth to acquire some of its clients. “Our growth has been slow but steady plus we have learnt to get solutions with the littlest amount of money,” Umah notes. “Being self-funded makes you think ten times harder. We don’t make emotional decisions. Every choice is filtered through one question: Can I still pay salaries if I do this?”
Being bootstrapped also means that the company hasn’t been able to afford top talent and has to train some of its staff.
“We’ve had to do with recommendations from within our network which came with its challenges,” Umah said. “Because we hired based on relationships and not necessarily competence, some staff weren’t good enough.”
The company says that when it raises money, it will be able to hire talents of its choice.
Present day: A business built on belief
Today, MyFoodAngels has served over 10,000 users, with 5,000 coming back monthly. The company is profitable and employs over 30 people, a far cry from the five-person hustle of Mile12 Market Woman.
“We serve both B2C and B2B. Restaurants love us because they can trace the source of their food—and access expense data through our platform.”
And while the operation now hums, certain realities remain. Post-harvest losses still hurt, especially with leafy vegetables. Cold storage remains a critical bottleneck. “We sell as we uptake. But if we had proper storage, we could hold inventory longer, reduce sale cost, and waste less.”
Nigeria loses ₦3.5 trillion ($2.11 billion) each year to post-harvest losses—an amount that’s nine times the country’s current agricultural budget. The impact is especially severe for fruits, vegetables, and tuber crops, with nearly half of all harvests lost before they reach consumers.
Umah’s solution to tackling post-harvest losses is twofold: first is better cold storage facilities, and second is using F1 seeds, a hybrid seed immune to Tuta absoluta, tomato leaf miner, a common disease that ravages food crops across the country. MyFoodAngels provides farmers with the seed for a share agreement: farmers keep 30% of the yield while giving 70% to the company.
I asked if Umah has ever thought about quitting the business. “Yes, I have thought about quitting a lot of times,” Umah said.
“Post-harvest loss is real, and it’s more disheartening to help a farmer prevent that, only to lose the same products after offtaking due to lack of adequate transportation and storage facilities. As a bootstrapping founder, it’s a lot more painful. We’ve developed huge skin in the game for every new frontier.”
Six years after shunning investors’ money, MyFoodAngels is in the market to raise $500,000 pre-seed funds. Part of the funding will go into cold storage infrastructure. MyFoodAngels has also been testing out operations in Abuja, where it plans to expand next after its fundraising. It also plans to launch a mobile app soon.
But for now, Umah stays grounded in purpose. “Until the average Nigerian can spend less than 51% of their income on food, we have work to do.” She doesn’t romanticise the road. “It’s been slow. It’s been steady. But I’d do it again. A thousand times, yes.”
