Exotic Taste’s Amina Abrahams and her daughter Faatimah Nordien, who is a director of Exotic Taste, managing all sales, marketing and the export business.Amina Abrahams started a business in her kitchen as she struggled to survive after being retrenched.
From its humble beginnings as a strategy for financial survival 17 years ago, Amina Abrahams has managed to develop her atchar business into a profitable company – and it's steadily increasing its footprint, with some 30 staff on its books today. At the time, she had just got divorced and lost her job at a bank and was desperate to support herself and her two children.
At first it was just family and friends who purchased Abrahams' products, along with Elite Supermarkets in Athlone, whose owners, the Banderker brothers, she had known since she was a child. And then 12 years ago she approached a Shoprite buyer about her products. The group became interested in her Exotic Taste product and piloted it in both Shoprite and Checkers, before deciding to roll them out across the entire Western Cape's Checkers store footprint.
There has also been a lot of personal growth for her as well, with Abrahams saying that when she started she knew very little about producing food products for retail and had to learn everything by going on short courses, ranging from food safety to technology. Today, she has a full-time food technologist on site at the factory. The latest agreement with Shoprite fulfils an ambition that Abrahams always had: that of having a national footprint for her products.
_Business I will say that the administration of this company is working very hard to see that everything goes well with all investors millywebdeve