How Yozuna was born! June 11 2012, 2 Comments

Part 1 of 3

How do you summon 5 years of hard graft, sweat and tears in a 500-word blog?? The answer is, its just not possible!! So for a person who is dyslexic and not very academically prowess at school, it is quite a daunting task to always put pen to paper, but in these modern times I gather its keys to screen! So I decided to pluck up the courage write a blog and stick to it.( I see my good friend Marisa smiling!!:) What i'm going to do next is take you way back to the very beginning!(Lion king theme song comes to mind) I remember the week I was brainstorming about launching my very own food product, since being in the Natural and Organic sector for 10 years leaving my beloved homeland Zambia, which I miss dearly. I sat down to a documentary hosted by Ray Mears on the San tribe in Kalahari. It so happened a short part of the film was on the baobab and I watched in fascination how the Bushman utilized the fruit to its maximum. What captured me most was how they roasted and ground the baobab seeds and made a coffee substitute out of it. A light went off if my head as I thought this might just be the product to launch.

It just so happened that in the next couple of weeks, I was traveling to Zambia for a holiday and  to have my daughter baptized at Victoria Falls. I also had arranged a meeting at the head office of OPPAZ (organic producers and process of Zambia), so I thought this was the perfect opportunity to see what I could do with Baobab.

After the meeting I was very fortunate to meet Margaret Zimba who formed a women's cooperative in the Chinjala region of Zambia (which literally means Big hunger) Lucky for me she was the only person I could find who was actually working with Baobab and making some food products out of it.

I travelled to the Eastern province of Zambia to visit the cooperative but more importantly pay my respects to my one of my Uncles and Grandmother who had passed away and who were buried on my Uncle Adams farm. I hadn't seen my relatives for so many years and it was a wonderful experience to go back and visit. When I got back from the cooperative Mrs Zimba and I shared alot of ideas and she showed me how the cooperative had made a jam out of the Baobab fruit and I showed her how you could make a coffee drink out of the seeds. It was amazing to share that knowledge around the 'tree of life'.

Under a clear and star-studded African sky, I got my cousins to try the jam and coffee, which we had roasted on a traditional Zambian stove called an ‘Mbaula’ and they all shouted "Yozuna"!!!!!!!!!!!! I had my note pad handy, as I travel with one every where I go, to jot down any great ideas and thoughts that come to me and I thought this could be the perfect name for the brand and the company I wanted to launch. 

It seemed all the pieces where falling into place and everything was moving forward and pushing me in the right direction!! The real word from the Ngoni tribe is pronounced Yonzuna and I thought this might be just a little to long and the consumer in UK might not grasp it, so we settled for Yozuna as it stems from it and was shorter and easier to pronounce !!!!! So why have we changed to The African Chef??

When I got back to the UK it was going to be almost 1 and half years before we would see the our Baobab Product on a retail shelf. In the UK, the tons of legislation, paper work and red tape to launch a product was absolutely mind blogging. We also had wait for a Novell foods approval for the Baobab fruit to be granted by the FSA before we could start to sell any product selling any product using the Baobab fruit, we also leaned that the seeds needed to be approved as well, so my idea to make a coffee substitute fizzled out. 

But I knew how to make Baobab Jam so I begin working on various recipes to come out with the perfect balance of Baobab fruit and sugar. We could not believe the regulations in place just to label a Jam was another upward struggle!! But we persevered and sent out a series of emails to various companies, once the Baobab was approved for consumption in the Uk and corresponding EU member states.

The very first return email we got back was from Selfridges in London. They loved the product and wanted it in store in 1st of Jan (2008)!! WOW! We ordered our labels for our Limited Edition Kilner Jar and were so excited to put the label on all the jars that I had made over Christmas, working day and night to fulfill the order.When it came to attaching the labels, due to the curve, the specially designed label, "Disaster" !!! They wouldn't fit…..