Disruptor or Middleman? The Business Model That Broke Twiga Foods

Show notes

On this episode of Admin Access, Dominic and Evans unpack the collapse of Twiga Foods, the Kenyan agritech that raised over $185 million before splitting into two companies and landing in administration. Dominic makes his case for the episode: Twiga didn't die when it went into administration, it was already dead long before, administration just made it official. The pair trace Twiga's arc from its 2014 founding by ex-Coca-Cola exec Peter Njonjo, built on cutting out the brokers between smallholder farmers and mama mbogas, through its pivot into non-perishables, its own trucking fleet and depots, and eventually buying a 650-hectare farm that undercut its original thesis. Evans makes the case that Twiga never really disrupted Marikiti-style informal markets, it just tried to out-compete them, subsidised by venture money rather than by fixing the underlying margins. They get into the mechanics of venture funding itself, why a plateau reads as decline, why growth has to compound year on year, and why "administration" is really just the moment the music stops. That leads into the leaked "Project Easter" slides, a strip-it-for-parts scenario that Dominic argues is standard practice elsewhere but nearly impossible to execute transparently under Kenyan and African insolvency law. Dominic draws a parallel to Boeing offloading Wisk and its autonomous units, and to Google's acquisition of Motorola for patents alone. The episode wraps with a detour into Bending Spoons, the Italian company quietly buying up "yesteryear" SaaS names like Evernote, Airtable, Meetup and WeTransfer once they've fallen from grace, and why African markets don't yet have a legal path for that kind of second-life acquisition. Evans closes with an ecosystem metaphor: dying companies aren't wasted, they're the insects that recycle value back through the system.

Disruptor or Middleman? The Business Model That Broke Twiga Foods

Show notes

In this episode