Who: Nkechinyere Idinmachi, founder of Machi Earth Foods

Theme: Food security and Nutrition, SDG 2

Over the years, there has been progress made in fighting hunger and malnutrition in the Africa region. Commonly regarded as a problem that mainly concerns children, the Africa region’s adult population also face a malnutrition burden in the form of anaemia, diabetes or food allergies.

Nkechi Idinmachi wanted to make a real change as she faced this problem herself and founded Machi Earth Foods, an agro-business and innovative, allergy-free food manufacturing company that promotes good nutrition, tackles malnutrition and supports food security in Nigeria, through the processing of Africa’s valuable, but relegated food crops, namely Bambara and Egusi. Machi foods produces a range of protein dense, delicious food products for people of all ages. Customers include healthy-living enthusiasts, vegans, children and adults with common food allergies and dietary restrictions.

Her motivation for starting this business were the numerous food allergies her son was facing. In order to be able to provide him with all necessary nutrients required for his growth, she spent over a year researching local Nigerian foods and their nutritional values. In addition, she took a course from Stanford school of Medicine on Child Nutrition and Cooking. During this time, she shared her findings and recipes for baby food on her online platform – Baby Chef Nigeria which eventually led to the birth of Machi Earth Foods and it’s 11,000 member community.

The Machi Foods team is made up of experts in Food Science and Technology, Digital Marketing and Nutrition. Aside from their commitment to the eradication of malnutrition and food insecurity , they also aim to improve the means of livelihood of smallholder farmers by providing decent jobs for stay-at-home parents who join their distribution channel. They hereby contribute to several SDG’s.

Working with extremely limited resources, from a cottage factory using mostly manual labor, Machi Foods has developed 8 products and recorded an 80% return purchase rate. In the last 6 months, the company has recorded tremendous success, as Nkechi received a nomination for the Entrepreneurship Africa Prize for Innovation and won the National finals to represent Nigeria at the Entrepreneurship World Cup 2020.

She is also passionate about helping women find their purpose and founded marketing communications which coaches women to start and scale their businesses byequipping them with digitalskills required to reach their target market and make sales.

Adittionally Nkechi is a One Young World Ambassador and a Dutch MFA Enterprise for Peace Scholar.

We are incredibly proud to have Nkechi as part of Orange Corners and we wish her and team the best of luck with all future projects!