How I tripled my profits from selling chilli sauces

As early as her teenage, Njoki Kivuti loved her food spiced with hot sauces or just chilli. Sauce, she says, alters a person’s eating experience.

“You don’t just eat to fill up, but to savour every bite,” Kivuti says.

Hers has been an intimate relationship with that which goes inside the human mouth.

We meet Ms Kivuti at a restaurant. It is no surprise she douses a corner of her plate with a generous amount of chilli sauce.

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Not every vegetable or meat that arrives on the kitchen counter has natural flavouring. That, she says, does not mean that you have to stomach the food as it is.

In Kivuti’s world, spices exist to magically transform such food into masterpieces that leave taste buds bursting with goodness.

“Where I come from it is said dhufu (soup) is everything: food swims in it,” she says, laughing cheekily. “Add spices and even dhufu will surprise you.”

Her latest dalliance with spices has however seen her found a sauces business.

Too Much Sauce, as the company is called, uses chilli as the main ingredient to manufacture a line that boasts five products: barbeque sauce, Peri Peri, Sweet Thai Chilli, Peri Win and Passion Peri.

Silent army

Too Much Sauce is now part of the silent army in the middle of the agricultural value chain through which farm produce are transformed into interesting products.

At age 12, Kivuti already knew that she wanted to own an agribusiness.

“I remember seeing a beautiful logo and telling myself, ‘The day I have my own business this is the logo I want’”.

Then, three years ago, on her friend’s book, she wrote: ‘Start a sauce business’.

In 2020, behold, Kivuti made good her plans to start the business. The journey however wasn’t that simple.

The drive to actualise the business idea came in waves – much like labour pains. It was in 2018 that her conviction reached ready-to-launch level.

“That was the year we were going to roll out and run with it,” she says.

However, as fate would have it, those ambitions were scuttled when she could not get a place to train on food manufacturing.

Lockdown Effect

In 2019 she started trying out different formulations in her kitchen. She would mix ingredients in different proportions: cook, stir and have fun with it.

“Since I couldn’t launch I decided to try out different recipes. It was all trial and error. I was solely relying on my intuition.”

From hundreds of recipes she narrowed down to the most exquisite. She refined these too and narrowed down further.

By mid-March this year, as Kenya was announcing its first case of Covid-19, Kivuti had arrived at a number of formulae. But procrastination was once again slowing her down.

The lockdown measures that subsequently followed jolted her back to focus.

“When the country went into lockdown, offices were closing and some jobs were being lost. Like any other Kenyan I also felt a strong need to find an alternative source of income.

“My sister and I then decided to push through with the sauce business. But first we needed to decide which formulae we would pick.

“In April, we started giving out to friends and family free samples. It is from their feedback that we were able to narrow down to the products we have launched thus far,” she says.

Highs and lows

The other challenge that she would face inevitably was preservation. One of the free samplers reported that the sauce formed mould after a few days.

At this point, Kivuti knew that to move forward she would need the training she was struggling to find. But where would such training be available?

By some luck – or coincidence – a friend (a graduate of food science) referred her to Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute (Kirdi).

“At Kirdi I assessed their facilities and determined that they would be worth trying out. I was assigned a food scientist to train and mentor me.”

The scientist assigned to Kivuti was Getrude Maisiba Okiko, a researcher attached to Kirdi’s Food Technology Division.

Okiko says: “Njoki approached us seeking assistance on how to improve her product. She also needed guidance in attaining the necessary certifications for market access.

“We took her through a weeklong, custom made, one-on-one practical training. This training armed her with the required skills to push her to the next level.”

The training at Kirdi, Kivuti says, was a game changer for her business.

“My greatest challenge going in was how to preserve the sauce and give it long shelf life. I learnt how to use preservatives on the sauces.

“I learnt other things such as how to effectively cook sauces, how to disinfect jars, how to perform bottling, how to pick high quality ingredients and so on,” she says.

Kivuti is living up to the 2017 policy strategy by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Cooperatives, which subscribes to the buy Kenya build Kenya ideology.

Too Much Sauce uses a variety of ingredients, namely garlic, chilli, lemon, passion fruit, coriander, ginger, tomatoes and mint to name a few.

“All of these ingredients are locally grown and sourced,” Kivuti says.

“We did not just want to make a sauce; we wanted to make an authentically Kenyan sauce.”

Local farmers

The company buys bullet chillis from local farmers in Machakos and Murang’a counties. According to Kivuti, three farmers have signed on to be supplying fresh ingredients to the company.

“Over time we will get to work with more farmers across the country,” she says.

The criteria for partnering with farmers, she says, has been put in place by the company’s quality control manager.

“We consider the type and amounts of pests and fertilisers that the farmer uses: do they meet health requirements?”

Soon, she says, Too Much Sauce will itself be growing chilli in large scale.

“Chilli is by far our main ingredient,” she says. “Specifically bullet chillies.”

At the manufacturing table the ingredients are further sorted to eliminate diseased, punctured, discoloured and odd looking pieces.

The sauce industry is competitive. In most middle-class restaurants you would most likely be served a meal with imported sauce.

Stiff competition

“Competition is good,” Kivuti says.

“We are competing against corporates and multinationals but we are undeterred because we believe that Kenyans deserve high quality sauces with ingredients grown and manufactured locally.”

Too Much Sauce sauces are packaged in glass jars. Plastered across the jars is the company logo and artistic colour patterns to differentiate each of the products. The final ensemble is inviting to the eyes.

Kivuti says: “We are currently using social media to market our sauces. We have a shop outlet in Nairobi CBD from which clients can buy the sauces. We also do deliveries to every part of the country.”

Having sold their first jars in June (two months ago) the agriprenuer is optimistic that soon enough Too Much Sauce will be available on supermarket outlets across Kenya.

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