fsp-chain

Our food systems are facing a real threat of foreign takeover. There are millions of local operators in the industry, but everyone is scattered. That fragmentation comes down to a lack of trust, lack of visibility, and a lack of clean commercial communication.

Coming from a software background, we believed technology could help fix this. We started by looking at the frontline creators we called food custodians: the cooks, caterers, and bakeries.

We built a costing calculator in an Excel sheet, quickly turned it into a web app, and shared it with food creators. Next, we built a dedicated portfolio platform so caterers and chefs could present their services cleanly outside social media.

Still, operators kept telling us the same thing: money was going missing, and they did not understand where it was going. To help them at the counter, we built a sales terminal.

Along with missing cash, operators brought up another painful reality: ingredient quality. Open market palm oil was stretched with chemical dye, and dry pepper was cut with sawdust.

Following that complaint opened our eyes to the middle layer. Kitchens were not buying from large industrial processors. They were buying from neighborhood retail shops and market stalls, who were themselves trapped buying from an informal upstream chain.

To understand the broken supply lines, we got our hands dirty. We launched Project Ewvie, running daily food operations ourselves in Lagos and sourcing pure staples directly from millers.

That was where the whole picture opened up. Food service providers and neighborhood retail shops were locked together in the same struggle. That entire middle layer was suffering from the exact same disease: loose credit given to regulars, cash slipping away at the till, and zero clear records of where money was moving.

Living that reality showed us the gaps software had ignored. We built tools to track customer debt and send invoices. But the biggest gap across this whole network was knowing where every single naira goes in and out of the business. That is why we took our boldest step yet: building a ledger from the ground up.

Today, fsp-chain is built to give this entire independent network, from neighborhood retail shops to commercial kitchens, clean numbers, healthy financials, and the strength to stand strong together and protect our food systems.