Farmula (visit website)
Location: Kenya

According to a United Nation environment programme survey, about one-third of the food produced across the world is wasted. In fact, food that perishes before it can be eaten in Sub Saharan Africa alone is enough to feed 300 million people across the world. That’s the massive scale at which food wastage and inefficiencies are built into food chain distribution. Let’s talk about an innovative solution provided to reduce the inefficiencies in this sector by a Kenyan-based Agrictech company with concerns about the future of food distribution on the African continent.
It all started during the 2018 MEST conference where few individuals met and came up with the concept “Farmula”. Thanks to this conference for bringing these like minds together.
Farmula was co-founded by Vivian Opandoh alongside a diverse team; Ahmed Madani who is the Senior Software Engineer, Jacky Kimani Co-founder and product lead and Ibrahim Abdulmalik who is the Head of Operations.

As diverse as we are in Africa, one thing is common across every market which is Open-Air-Market. As the name implies, it is a public marketplace where food and merchandise are sold. Despite the fact that the market provides the largest opportunity for over 60 million farms on the continent, it also revealed the effects of fragmentation in our supply chain. There is no form of data collection, poor margins, and inconvenient purchases. This is the gap they intend to bridge.
Farmula aims to make life easier for farmers by building software that enables existing traditional distributors to sell online, leverage on-demand delivery, issue credit to retailers, and reduce the problems that would affect their profitability margins. Your farm produce is just a WhatsApp away from you. Retailers are able to place orders via USSD code, phone calls, or interacting with a virtual assistant named I/O (Input Output) Life is easier when you get the code. These orders are routed to Farmula’s closest distribution centres which are able to fulfil their orders in under one hour. Anytime the inventory is going low in these countries, they restock using an automated system.

You remembered I talked about I/O previously, let’s dive deep into it now!
I/O is a virtual assistant that is integrated into existing apps like WhatsApp. Retailers are able to place an order for food via voice or text. This also provides a chance to get the history of the purchases and can serve as evidence when needed. I/O works directly with Farmula’s manually distributed centres used to optimize food movement from partner farmers to retailers. It improves the margin because it is manually operated and location-specific. The I/O is able to understand customers ordering patterns thereby improving their customer service.
Farmula shifted from being a Distributor to Distro. How was that possible?
When they started out, they realized there was no software tailored to the African market. As such, they built an internal control for themself starting from stock-taking, to Customer relationship management (CRM) supporting field sales and Last-mile logistics management with 3rd party operatives. Because they set out to build the best dashboard ever, they started getting data to optimize. With their collection of data, relationships with their partners improved tremendously. The goal was to use demand-driven information to improve the way farmers produced and how produce is distributed. With this, we can see that data is the new oil just like the infamous saying.

First Version App
Their first version was a dashboard with farmer contacts, market prices, blog, price prediction charts, account books, retailer contacts, bulk SMS capabilities, route tracking, everything you could think of. The distro was introduced to address the shortcomings of the previous version app. Remember I talked about it earlier on?
Just the way you purchase airtime within a second from your bank apps even though we expect them to get the apps optimized for faster transactions soon, you can purchase farm produce with the Distro app within an hour. The distro was introduced in February 2021, it served as version 2.0 that digitizes a distributor’s operations and makes it seamless to leverage a scalable infrastructure. They made the following features and improvements from the first version to Distro: They created an Offline first, a Money in and Money out, an Inventory tracking, a Direct sales, Purchase feature, Market Information and Profile Management.
With Distro…
With Distro, complex operations are simplified and power is put in the palms of distributors because Farmula understands the difficulties that come with digitizing manual operations. They provide personal account managers to listen to and address feedback through Whatsapp, in-app, and calls. In the end, it’s only through listening that a platform customers will love can be built.

Do we wonder what keeps retailers coming back?
Apart from the better margins given to businesses and the short delivery time being offered, Farmula also provides so many other incentives for the retailers. These include products sampling before delivery, satisfied customers’ referrals, return order management anytime a retailer has an issue with his purchase, loyal points upon the retailer’s purchase.
With 2 asset-light storage facilities and 10 tricycle riders, they have been able to reach 50 customers, over 2600 fulfilled orders with a whopping revenue of over $60k within 2 years. You find that amazing, right?
Farmula provides key infrastructure which improves food movement and distribution. Because, they do not own the transportation services, this led to partnerships with different logistics services which makes it easier to deliver to retailers on time. As they are ensuring food security, they also seek to reduce the rate of unemployment through their solution.
Integrating Manually
By integrating the manually operated distribution centres with technology, the Kenyan-based agritech company is able to know what produce retailers are ordering, the frequency of orders, and the price they’re willing to pay. Farmula looks forward to building a robust distribution system that brings farmers and retailers closer to each other.

With this system, Kenyans don’t have to leave their house before they can eat potatoes and other farm produce. You should be quite sure we all in the African eco-space want to enjoy this amazing product and get it really at our palm. Currently, Kenyans ad Nigerians are the ones enjoying this. Imagine the number of waste produce Farmula can contain if getting the right funding. We applaud the management and we implore stakeholders and users to explore this huge market base that has not been explored previously by any other company in Africa. The magic they are creating is an amazing feat that will help tackle SDGs 1, 2 and 8
We implore Farmula to look more into perishable food products such as fruits, vegetables and root crops as they account for 40-50% of food loss and waste.
Question
What is that food commonly grown in your country? Can you name that crop that produces waste the most every year? Tell us, so we can send your responses back to them.
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