The Health Entrepreneurship (HENT) Challenge’s first cohort is visiting Toronto this summer, where they are continuing their implementation phase through activities targeting business development, expanding entrepreneurial networks and facilitating exposure to potential investors. 

In the meantime, the HENT Communications team caught up with the ventures from the first HENT Challenge cohort to learn more about the origins of their companies, what they’ve learned to date, and what is coming up next... 

Food Bundles - RWANDA

Having grown up in rural areas, Dioscore Shakima and his co-founder were well aware of the obstacles small farmers faced in accessing customers. This inspired them to create Food Bundles, an app that enables farmers to increase their earnings and reduce post-harvest losses. Their solution allows consumers in bigger cities to budget for their food, and small farmers to have the ability to limit food price inflation by eliminating middlemen grocery stores. Food Bundles collects produce directly from small farmers and their app provides consumers the opportunity to get fresh food delivered right to their doorstep.

Acknowledging the researched connection between Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) and malnutrition, poor distribution of nutritious food and poor education on health nutrition, Food Bundles is also using their platform to fight increasing NCDs in cities. Through Food Bundles, household consumers in cities can select pre-made bundles of food which are curated to maximize nutrition. Customers can also opt to receive recommendations based on their health status, ensuring they have access to the food best positioned to improve their health. 

What is the accomplishment to date that your team is most proud of?   

Finding a market product with a working business model that was ready to scale up was a great achievement. We have a mobile application for both consumers and aggregators available on both iOS and Android which allows us to serve all our users. To date, we have built a network of 10,000 smallholder farmer suppliers and seen more than 1500 transactions with customers in Kigali. We are also happy to expand our operations in the Zambia market! 

If you could give advice to another founder getting started, what would that be? 

Be ready to exercise patience, building a product is not the problem but finding a product market fit to have a profitable and scalable business takes much time than expected, and raising needed capital is harder than what you can possibly imagine. Have resilience! 

Looking forward, Food Bundles is aiming to raise the necessary financial resources to stabilize their technology, upgrade their logistics, and scale up to three markets in the next year and a half. In their upcoming quarter, this looks like growing their B2B customers base, with a goal of obtaining daily fresh food orders of $100+ to 100 small-to-medium restaurants.  

You can learn more about Food Bundles by visiting their website.