PIC CAPTION: Julia Venn founded Bii, a social enterprise startup whose mission is to fight food waste and food insecurity through innovative and tech solutions. Image: Supplied / Bii
Globally, it is estimated that one-third of food produced is lost or wasted due to poor post-harvest practices, incorrect food storage methods and discarding perfectly good food before its expiry date, resulting in a staggering $1 trillion economic loss that has a ripple impact on farmers and consumers, particularly when it comes to addressing food insecurity issues and ensuring people have access to healthy, nutritious meals. In Sub-Saharan Africa, it is estimated that 37% (of $1 trillion) is wasted, or 120 to 170 kg/year per person. This amounts to $370 billion for Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of food waste and loss. Julia Venn co-founder at Bii, a social enterprise startup that combats unnecessary food wastage shares her startup success story with AfricArena’s Jabulile Sonya Ngwenya.
Bii is a social enterprise startup whose mission is to fight food waste and food insecurity through innovative and tech solutions. Food waste and loss, Julia Venn notices, “is a problem that is not yet much addressed in Africa. It's a problem that we can actually turn into an opportunity to create green jobs for women, to end hunger and to make food more affordable fighting against rising food prices due to inflation. Today, we waste between 30% - 40% of the world's food production. If we could save only a quarter of this, we could feed everyone around the planet suffering from hunger. The other three quarters could be reintroduced to the commercial cycle in order to make food more affordable by bringing it to the market with a lower price.”
And so enter Bii into the picture as a player within the global food waste and loss market. Bii, Venn says, “is a marketplace that connects surplus food from hotels, supermarkets, bakeries or farmers (B2B) to consumers (B2C & B2B2C) who are looking for quality products at a cheap price all by getting it conveniently delivered to their homes while having a positive impact on the environment and on people’s lives.” The global sustainable food market was in 2023, according to a Future Data Stats report, valued at $1.2 trillion, and is projected to reach $2.5 trillion by 2030.
Bii was founded in 2019 in Madagascar under the brand FoodWise and as Association before expanding operations to Côte d’Ivoire and Morocco in 2020. In 2022 the organisation started a restructuring process and became Bii, moving from an association to an impact business. Bii’s co-founder is a tech company called Nexaya, represented by its managing director Rachid Boutachdat. Nexaya is a German headquartered IT services and consulting firm with hubs in Morocco, Egypt and Nigeria.
The name Bii, pronounced “bee” is an unusual name, and a conversation starter as Venn shares that Bii, which comes from the Dioula language means “‘today’ because tomorrow, the food is already spoiled!” Dioula is a language spoken in particular in Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Mali.
Julia also points out that it is a double-entendre as she shares that “Bii is homophonous with the English word “bee” and the organization of bees is based on a true circular economy as nothing is lost, everything is optimized, transformed and revalued.” As well as the word “be” to state that we are different at Bii and our consumers: “Bii (be) different”, “Bii (be) green”, “Bii (be) courageous” etc. Bii is a state of mind and a lifestyle which is sustainable.
Venn says her journey started with a series of lightbulb moments that coalesced into an ‘aha moment’ which sparked the idea for Bii. Venn shares with AfricArena that one day, she was listening to her mother asking important questions about “what happens to the products of the bakery right around the corner that was still producing new products at 4pm in the afternoon when they would close at 5pm.” This gave Venn something to think about, but it was still not enough to galvanise her into action.
She shares how, while visiting a friend, she opened the fridge and found an outdated yoghurt container. Chuckling at the memory, Venn says “the friend wanted to throw it away, but I said “Why do you want to waste it? Maybe it’s still good. Let’s use our senses first. Open it, look at it, smell it and taste it” and the rest is history.” A tasting session between five people took place in that kitchen and Venn recounts, the result was both interesting and eye-opening. “Everyone agreed that the yoghurt was totally fine for consumption.” This, Venn says, certainly gave me food for thought. She also started “dumpster diving” and organized with the rescued food sensitization campaigns at the university with an NGO called FoodSharing e.V.
However, it was while Venn was researching on food waste that she had a turning moment when she realised she could make a difference. “I realized that food waste is a problem we can actually solve, and alongside it, the hunger-problem that many people face. It’s a subject that connects us all around the world. If we waste food, global food prices are rising, a person in another country living on a day-to-day basis might not be able to buy the daily food anymore or less leading to either malnutrition or hunger - because of our personal action. And, last but not least, we can all act on this topic. We can buy and order only what we need, we can take doggy bags, we can preserve it, we can share it, or we can at least compost it.”
She pointed out that people who are able to eat three times a day are the lucky ones. “Hunger is a solvable problem. Food waste is an opportunity. We have a choice to impact positively or negatively to solve food wastage and food insecurity issues. Every single day. Every time we eat, we have an important impact on the rest of the world.”
Bii takes everything that is not sold on time, up to one day before expiry date and redistributes these food products to NGOs taking care of children in need so they can serve these children free, healthy and nutritious meals.
Consumers are able to make use of the Bii app to purchase their favourite products and contribute to a worthy cause. This, Venn says, is a win-win situation for everyone as “food suppliers improve their sustainability ranking, reduce costs and increase revenues; consumers can find all their favourite foods in just one click online at up to half the price while doing a good action for their community; and NGOs get free and nutritious meals for their children and can invest more into health and education.”
Venn shares with AfricArena that Bii’s most recent achievements were getting their first five business clients for their first launch in Côte d'Ivoire this year and winning the AfricArena Best Agnostics Startup Award at the AfricArena Abidjan Fintech, Energy, Mobility and Logistics Summit that took place in Abidjan, earlier this year in June.
This win, she says, means a lot as she founded Bii with zero funds and winning the AfricArena award has already given Bii incredible exposure within the sustainable food sector and beyond and validated Bii’s mission.
Bootstrapping a startup with zero capital is challenging, but not impossible, and when Bii got to the point they could start raising capital, Venn shares that the largest amount of funds they raised for the marketplace project was €126,195 which was used for technology development. This year, Bii is looking at raising €350 000 that will be used to build Bii’s dream team locally, invest into operations, marketing and improve the technology to ensure satisfied customers.
“I love my job as I have a positive impact on society and the planet every single day! I wake up every morning with motivation, because I do what I love and I love what I do!,” Venn tells AfricArena.
She shares that the moment she knew there was a need for Bii’s services within the sustainable food market. It all started when Bii’s social mission in Côte d’Ivoire proved successful as shared over 100 000 products or over 10 tons of food valued over
€200,000 over a period of two years to support 2,800 children on food security. This success, Venn says, “proved that there is food waste in our community and that Bii’s solution was effective.”
Furthermore, she says as part of their validation process, “we firstly did surveys with consumers to understand if they would be interested in buying those surplus food at a reduced price and we got a 99% response out of 138 people we interviewed to be interested. We also got insights on what products they look for, at what time of the day and how regularly, for what promotions, what delivery and payment system they look for and what platform they would like to use this offer on and so on.”
Venn adds that they “secondly further interviewed businesses to understand if they would be interested in selling those products at a reduced price to consumers. We got 100% validation feedback of the 15 companies/ groups we interviewed in Abidjan, as well as some insights on product types, volumes and frequency, the promotional price they would agree to give to Bii as well as the platform they would like to use.”
Thirdly, she adds, they looked into “all the details and real numbers with audits and data collection on the business side to validate the feedback they gave on volumes and money value and build up three key business cases for supermarkets, hotels and bakeries to become our pilot target market.”
Venn emphasises that “these data insights made us able to do realistic financial business modelling for our startup as our projection is based on real data from our future clients. And, last but not least, we validated the consumer interest of the survey through an MVP to validate the “act of purchase”. We currently sell, since July, close-to-expiry dates products at a reduced price via social media (WhatsApp and Facebook). This MVP also validated pricing, product interest, payment methods and the fees that we can charge for the transport. We will carry on with this MVP until mid-September, when our mobile app will be ready to launch! Today after only two and a half weeks of operations, we have already 600 members in our community and daily sales.
An ordinary day for Venn finds her cycling to the office, engaging in daily stand up calls with her co-founder for follow ups and strategic questions, meeting with her tech team for progress updates, touching base with customers, reaching out to investors, business angels and sending out proposals. In addition to this, she takes in and incorporates feedback to ensure her startup improves and is primed for success and she attends networking events. With the running MVP that has changed, as now from 8am to 8pm, she is fully in operations, the only time to catch up on documents, team calls and mails in mainly before and after these hours making her days endless with 16 hours of work daily. But, this is temporary till September and she’s happy and grateful as the solution starts to run and customers are grateful for this opportunity!
The key elements for any project to succeed, she says, is to go out there and test your idea; collect feedback, listen to customers and improve and network, network and network to share your story to investors, business angels and clients.All of this is combined with great teamwork, strategic thinking and data analysis. Venn says, “I believe as a founder you should try to ensure that every work day or at least every work week, you made some progress (even small action items) in the following areas: sales; fundraising and product improvement based on customer feedback.”
Venn shares that the biggest challenges she and her team face are that as a first in the industry player in Côte d’Ivoire, “there are no regulations, no public discussions on the subject, no ecosystem and missing knowledge. This is the biggest challenge we have as being the first one on the market means to build all of this from scratch, meaning investing a lot of time in building the awareness and the ecosystem around it through networking, events, meetings, proof of data and communication campaigns.”
Despite these challenges, the advice a mentor gave Venn is to “believe in yourself and get the right mindset; focus on customers; surround yourself with the right people and to move on, even if you fail, stand up, pivot, restart,” helped her to stay the course, and stay focused.
Venn says that as she reflects on the challenges she and her team experienced, and the many valuable lessons they learnt, they strongly advise entrepreneurs looking for an opportunity to launch a startup in the sustainable food sector to “know your customers and know your ecosystem, including the legal, environment and culture aspects,” as it will make the journey easier to navigate.
For more information about AfricArena and our upcoming events, visit our website at www.africarena.com
Comentarios