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The Igwe Twins (Tobias and Titus Igwe), owners of Speedmeals Mobile Kitchen, are gradually etching a name for themselves in the eatery business in Nigeria. They currently cater to a thousand customers in urban Lagos but plan to feed more. Ten thousand, as a matter of fact! Connect Nigeria caught up with the twins while they were shopping for food stuffs in the market recently. Not unusual, given that some men have embraced the skill considered by some to be the preserve of women. Excerpts: There must be something unique about your business. What is that thing? Speedmeals started as a mobile kitchen where we do deliveries for workers in their offices. We don’t run walk-in-and-eat kitchen. We have a mobile kitchen and deliver food to offices in urban areas, in Lagos. We have on in Lekki and Victoria Island. We have a central production factory in Ilupeju and now we have a new one in Surulere. So those spots are used for preparation of the meals from where you deliver? Exactly. We call those two places hubs and it is from there we prepare all our meals. It is from there we move to deliver to our customers. There’s this traditional perception among some Africans that women own the kitchen place. What’s your view about this perception? Women own the kitchen at home, but when it comes to industrial kitchen the guys run the show.

It’s a whole different ball game. The science of cooking in the house and the science of cooking for the public are different. Speedmeals is building a ten-thousand capacity factory to take care of ten thousand workers in Lagos. We can feed a thousand workers daily in Lagos now, but we are aiming for ten thousand workers per day. So when you talk of cooking for ten thousand people, it’s a totally different maths. But what matters really is the quality, and once you’re able to deliver on the quality that the customer wants then you’re bound to remain competitive in the marketplace. You said you plan to cater to ten thousand customers and presently manage one thousand daily. What is the capacity of your company for handling this? So far, we have twenty-five full-time workers and over forty-three contract staff with schedule for working. Some of them come in during the week to do their thing or when we have exceptional orders, we invite them over. It’s just a way to keep our operations running and to control expenditure. What exactly does it mean when you have exceptional orders? We have Asian cuisine; we have a mix of international with African touch, Mexican and Continental menus as well. So we like specialization at Speedmeals.

68688_587894824560036_1370816760_n — A glimpse of Speedmeals’ delicacies

When I say we have special orders, there are some days we have special requests so we produce those meals based on the requests. But we have the basic menus like Jollof Rice and such… For those special orders, how long does it take to get such ready? Say I make an order for a Mexican food and I need it in the next five hours; is this achievable? Five hours is even too long. Say you need a special order in the next 45 minutes or one hour, that is where Speedmeals comes in. Say if I order for a Chinese dish to be delivered in the next hour… It depends on the number of people you’re making the order for. If you’re ordering for just one person it will take about 30 minutes to prepare it, but it would cost you a bit more than if it was for a large number. And your location would also be factored into the cost and time of delivery as well. And we like to work with numbers to put the best use to our staff. Every society has its peculiar problems with regard to doing business. What kind of problems do you encounter consistently in your field? One of the major issues we’ve had is policy and infrastructure. When I say infrastructure, I mean the system that makes things work. We don’t have that. For instance, the agencies that check vehicles on the road, the VIOs, agberos and others; they’ll stop your vehicles severally before you get to your destination and as a result delay your time of delivery. The issue of electricity is another, but we’ve tried to find a way to navigate around those issues that we cannot change. Instead of spending thousands of naira on diesel everyday, we decided it was economically viable to run our operations on gas. These are some of the ways we have been able to get around challenges, because the truth is that if you look at the number of challenges in Lagos it is the same number of the opportunities that are available. So we are not really looking at the challenges. For example, we looked at the traffic situation in Lagos and since 2009 when we’ve been in operations we’ve been able to gather our intelligence report on the traffic scenarios that present itself in different spots around Lagos. As such, we’ve never delivered late to our customers. We know the roads that are blocked at different periods in the day and we sometimes use motorcycles to beat such instances instead of using a van. Using five motorcycles is sometimes time-efficient than using a van. For now we have two vans and we have as much as six motorcycles. Speedmeals is not just a company; Speedmeals is more like a philosophy, so that if you want your food to be delivered to you on time, you’ll know whom to call. The business environment in Nigeria with regard to the use of e-systems is changing very fast. How have you been able to integrate electronic operations into a traditional business like yours? We try to exploit every opportunity available to our business for the benefit of our customers. We have a Cook Online application where you can actually cook your meal with your mobile application. You just cook your meal with your mobile phone and someone will deliver it to you in your office or wherever you want it… But that would come at an added cost, right? When you’re cooking for home and you’re cooking for the public it’s a different mathematics altogether. When you cook for a thousand people, you’ll encounter people who don’t eat Maggi or Knorr. Some don’t even eat Maggi at all. So it is that reason we have an application like that which would enable people to customize their dishes. We are not yet where we are going, we still have a long way to go, but I believe we have what it takes. Let’s assume I need an order for two-hundred guests tomorrow, can I count on Speedmeals to deliver? You’ll be rest-assured you’ll get it. But we always prefer a 48-hour difference because this season is prime time due to the frequency of orders in this period. We place priority on satisfying our customers once their orders have been taken at Speedmeals.