How to Start a Food Business in Nigeria: What Nobody Tells You

If you are thinking about starting a food business in Nigeria, you have probably already been told to find your niche, create a menu, set your prices and start selling.

That advice isn't wrong. It is just incomplete because the hardest part of starting a food business is rarely figuring out what you want to cook.

The harder question is: Can you build a business around it?

I have watched people with great food struggle because they treated the food as the business.

It isn't.

The food is part of the business.

There is the customer, pricing, menu, packaging, operations, staff, supply chain, marketing, numbers and the story people tell about you.

Eventually, there is the question every food entrepreneur has to answer: Can this work repeatedly, not just once?

Start with the customer, not the menu

One of the easiest mistakes to make is starting with the food you want to sell.

• You love baking, so you start a cake business.

• Your jollof is popular at family gatherings, so you start selling trays.

• People tell you your pepper soup is amazing, so you decide to open a restaurant.

But people enjoying your food is not the same thing as having a food business.

Before you build a menu, you need to understand who you are feeding.

• Who is this food for?

• What do they need?

• When do they buy?

• What are they willing to pay?

• Are they buying convenience, celebration, comfort, everyday meals, an experience or something else?

Your answers will affect almost everything else you build.

Your menu is not your business model

This is one of the lessons I wish more food entrepreneurs understood early.

A menu tells people what you sell. It does not tell you whether the business works.

• You need to understand what each dish costs you to produce.

• You need to understand your pricing.

• You need to know which dishes people actually buy.

• You need to think about portion sizes, ingredients, packaging, labour, delivery and waste.

• You need to know what happens when the price of an ingredient changes.

• You need to know whether your best-selling dish is actually profitable.

• And you need to understand the difference between revenue and profit.

These things may sound less exciting than developing a new dish.

They are also what allow you to keep making the dish.

Creativity needs structure.

A beautiful food concept can still fail if the business underneath it does not work.

Start small enough to learn 

Your first customers are not just customers; they are evidence.

• They tell you whether people understand the offer.

• They tell you what they value.

• They tell you what they will pay for.

• They show you where the experience breaks.

My early experiences taught me that the beginning of a food business can look very small from the outside: a few orders, a carefully packed meal, a customer who returns, a suggestion, a complaint or a compliment you remember for much longer than you expected.

However, those small beginnings matter.

They teach you whether your food can travel beyond your own imagination and they teach you whether people will come back and that’s what matters.

You don't necessarily need to begin with a restaurant.

You need to begin with a clearer understanding of your customer, your product and your ability to deliver consistently.

Learn the difference between being good at food and being good at business

• You can be an excellent cook and still struggle to run a food business.

• You can create a beautiful menu and still have weak operations.

• You can have loyal customers and still underprice your food.

• You can have a strong brand and still lose money.

• You can have passion and still need discipline.

Running a food business requires a different set of muscles.

You have to think about operations, staffing, training, customer experience, marketing, revenue, product development and consistency alongside the food itself.

This was one of the things running restaurants taught me.

The kitchen is only one part of the business.

Everything eventually shows.

• Your systems show.

• Your values show.

• Your discipline shows.

• Your generosity shows.

• Even your fatigue shows.

A restaurant is an emotional ecosystem, but it is also an operating system.

Don't build a brand before you understand the story

There is another mistake I see often.

People spend a lot of time thinking about the logo, colours, packaging and Instagram page before they have really answered a more important question: What are you trying to say?

Your story is not just “I have always loved food.”

Almost everyone in the food business loves food.

• What makes your business distinct?

• What do you understand?

• What experience are you bringing?

• What do you want people to remember?

• Who are you trying to serve?

• And how does your story show up in the actual experience of buying from you?

When I worked on restaurant concepts and experiences, I learnt to ask questions like:

• What is the story?

• Who needs to experience it?

• How should it feel?

• What should they remember when they leave?

• How do we make the food visible without losing its soul?

Those questions matter whether you are building a restaurant, catering company, bakery, food product, supper club or culinary experience. Your story is part of the product

This is particularly important for African food businesses. Our food already carries history, memory, technique and identity and the goal is not to strip that away in the name of branding; It is to understand how to communicate it.

There is a difference between telling people that your food is “authentic” and actually giving them enough context to understand what makes it so.

There is a difference between putting a Nigerian dish on a menu and knowing the story, technique, ingredients and memories that sit behind it.

• Food is culture.

• Food is business.

• Food is memory.

• And food is also communication.

That is why I am increasingly interested in the relationship between food businesses and storytelling. A good story does not rescue a badly run business but when the food, business and story understand each other, something much stronger can happen.

So, how do you actually start? Start by asking better questions.

• Who are you feeding?

• What problem are you solving for them?

• What exactly are you selling?

• Why should they choose you?

• What does it cost you to produce it?

• What are people actually willing to pay?

• Can you deliver it consistently?

• What happens when demand increases?

• What does your customer experience feel like?

• What is the story behind the business?

• And perhaps most importantly: Can you build this without losing the reason you started?

We can build food businesses that are commercially viable without stripping the food of its identity.

Starting a food business is not just about knowing how to cook; it is about learning how to turn knowledge, creativity and food into something people can understand, experience, trust and return to.

If you're building a food business, let's talk about the story behind it.

On September 19, I will be hosting the Chef Dumebi Intensive: Storytelling for Food Businesses; an intensive designed for food business owners and aspiring food entrepreneurs who want to understand how to communicate their work with more clarity, intention and meaning.

Join the Chef Dumebi Intensive: Storytelling for Food Businesses → [REGISTRATION LINK]

Come with your food business, your idea or the thing you are still trying to figure out.

Let's put it on the table.