A prosthetic hand. FILE PHOTO | NMG
Many times when we think about technology, we often stop at the
digital touch point that we connect with hardly giving much thought to
what it takes on the fulfilment leg of a product or service that we
consume.
It almost seems magical when the vendor, producer or platform promise is fulfilled.
I
had the opportunity to visit the Twiga Foods pack house, a short hop
from the standard gauge railway terminus in Nairobi where the
convergence of physical and digital infrastructure innovation is almost
tangible.
Twiga Foods is a “business-to-business
marketplace platform that sources produce directly from farmers and
delivers it to urban retailers at below market prices”.
They are slowly replacing the physical wholesale marketplace,
aggregating the retail demand and supplying just in time, driving
immense value for both sides of their supply chain where product quality
and available margin form part of Twiga’s promise.
They
have raised a total of $13.4 million, the bulk of which was in their
Series A round in mid 2017 for $10.3 million led by Wamda Capital, a
MENA-focused venture capital firm. Being on site one develops a deep
appreciation and much needed context on the bold capital raise.
On
the physical, there is the obvious warehouse play with receiving,
sorting, grading and dispatch stations, but what stands next is the real
innovation point.
Rows of modified shipping
containers where banana’s their flagship product, which they have sold
over 200 million pieces, is safely and naturally ripened.
When
they started out, produce yield would hit 60 - 70 per cent, but through
lots or experimentation and iterations on a process they keep close to
heart, they are now at 95 per cent on average.
They
work backwards on their ripening process and when their 6,000-strong
retailer base place orders, Twiga is able to deliver based on the
‘readiness’ level desired.
On the digital, Twiga Foods
runs part of its stack off the Google Cloud Platform leveraging micro
service architecture heavily. This allows them to scale their operations
faster, cheaper and more efficiently without the addition overhead on
the DevOps side.
The Google Cloud Platform gives
access to highly secure and scalable infrastructure that covers the full
gamut of tools that one would require to build the next generation of
services covering; storage and databases, machine learning and
artificial intelligence, analytics, iot, big data and more.
Twiga
has taken time to innovate and create a moat that will protect its
growing market share and have them firmly on their way to supplying the
core basket of goods for millions of urban residents across Africa.
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