Café Deli owner’s dream of building a coffee chain

Café Deli owner and managing director Obado Obadoh. PHOTO | DIANA NGILA 

By SIMON CIURI, sciuri@ke.nationmedia.com

In Summary

• Sweet reward for former pastry chef as enterprise bug breeds success.

When Obado Obadoh was hired by Norfolk Hotel as an apprentice chef in 1990, he had no idea that the job would plant in him an entrepreneurship bug that would sprout into a multi-million shilling business two decades later. 

“I had just turned 18 and I needed a job to take care of my struggling family. I started off as an apprentice chef since I had no formal training and by the time I left (employment) in 2004, I was the pastry chef,” Mr Obadoh, the founder of Nairobi-based coffee house Café Deli, said in an interview on Friday.

Mr Obadoh’s plan was not to stay on the job for long.

He wanted to gain exposure to the hospitality industry, get to know how it works, and then decide what to do with his life. His stay in the hotel industry however lasted nearly 15 years, before he finally gained the courage to plunge into the entrepreneurial world.

After working at Norfolk for five years, he left for his second job with Safari Park Hotel, where he worked for four years before leaving for Nyali Beach.

Two-and-a-half years later he joined Sarova Panafric as a Pastry Chef until 2004 when he resigned from formal employment.

In the same year, he set up a pastry shop in Westlands, Nairobi, and incorporated two of his business partners to fund the young business.

“When the business started doing well, disagreements emerged and I opted to leave,’’ says Mr Obadoh, reflecting on an experience that almost pushed him into depression.

He was bought off from the business.

In 2006 he opened a pastry kitchen that focused on delivering to homes and supplying restaurants.

He registered Nanjala Limited, a start-up that took nearly six months to break-even, surviving mainly on a few trader-clients who would buy from him and re-sell at a small profit.

He later employed sales people to sell some of his merchandise at bus terminuses, paying them on commission.

As the business grew steadily, Mr Obadoh learned that a coffee shop by the name Coffee World located along Nairobi’s Moi Avenue was being sold off. He put in a bid for the business but lost since he did not have Sh18 million needed to acquire the firm.

The banks told him that his asset value of Sh2 million at the time was too little to cover the financing that he required to buy out the firm.

Unbowed, he approached a venture fund that loaned him the cash to expand his business, which he re-named Coffee Deli. He renovated the premises that had a capacity for 60 people and expanded it to accommodate 80. This was in 2011.