We also investigated opportunities to develop technology solutions to catalyze industrialization in the value chains we explored. After several months of exploration, we discovered that food factories’ biggest challenge was securing enough quality raw material to fulfill their growing demand. We have built our business model around this realization.
After intense R&D, our proprietary patent-pending hardware, Kraken, came online in January 2021. It processes 500T of palm nuts per week to produce premium palm kernel products at 95% purity, better than the 88% industry standard. Kraken costs less than half of the cost of an imported de-sheller. It operates 25x faster than local cracking equipment crackers and 240x faster than de-shelling by hand.: Your recent fundraising announcement has been years in the making.
We will keep providing solutions to food processing problems at scale, working with partners across the continent, naturally leading to Releaf becoming a unicorn. Nigeria alone has a $3 billion vegetable oil market. If you’re close to the data, you are expected to have a perspective on acting on it. Saying “I don’t know” is rarely an acceptable answer, so we encourage the team to describe what they do know and make an estimate of it.
Beyond these virtues, we also have a set of 17 operating principles that are critical for our long-term success. These include developing others, having error-free work, being an unblockable collaborator, and so on. Some informed these operating principles of the acute challenges we faced as we recruited our local team and increasingly how we learned to develop talent as we built. Each principle has about five levels of mastery with clear descriptions of what it takes to reach that mark.
I love the african dress code!