NutriPitch 2019: The Nourish Nigeria Challenge Selects Winners

NutriPitch – the Nourish Nigeria Challenge – is a unique accelerator programme developed in partnership with the SUN Business Network Nigeria, GAIN, and supported by FATE Foundation. The competition is dedicated to scaling up nutrition and food safety focused businesses that are innovatively supporting the value chain by promoting nutrition and food safety diets in Nigeria. The second edition of NutriPitch took place from September to December 2019.

With over 44 strong applications received from across Nigeria, the top 10 entrepreneurs were admitted to the 2019 NutriPitch Challenge through a rigorous screening process and commenced the accelerator programme hosted by FATE Foundation. This included a one-week boot camp, followed by intensive workshop sessions over the course of three weeks focused on; Innovation in Nutrition & Food Safety, Value Chain Analysis, Financial Management, and Investor Readiness. During the programme FATE Foundation also provided one-to-one GAP Advisory sessions with business and sector-focused consultants to help the finalists review and refine their growth goals to scale.

The programme ended with the NutriPitch Final, which took place on 12th December 2019. This provided an excellent opportunity for the participants to present to a panel of judges (Mr Olusegun Oso, Director, ABRAAJ Group, Mrs Iquo Ukoh, CEO, Entod Marketing/1Q Food Platter, Dr Felix Eze, Funding Executive, GROFIN) and an audience of impact investors, angel investors, venture capitalists, start-up founders and industry experts looking to partner with and potentially invest in the businesses. The finalists pitched their innovative solutions to promote nutrition for a chance to win a range of prizes, and represent Nigeria in the Global SUN Pitch Competition.

BabyGrubz was crowned the overall winner of the 2019 NutriPitch Challenge. BabyGrubz provides affordable, nutritious and natural food products for Nigerian children. These products are exclusively distributed by women, a deliberate empowerment approach for financial inclusion to end poverty. In addition, BabyGrubz provides nutrition education through seminars and social media posts to a group of almost 200,000 mothers across Nigeria. BabyGrubz won the sum of NGN 500,000 and will participate in the Global SUN Pitch Competition later in 2020.

Mealimeter and E-Farms, runners up at the NutriPitch Challenge, were also recognised for their innovative solution to improve nutrition and will also represent Nigeria at the Global SUN Pitch Competition. Mealimeter is an automated nutrition marketplace which uses technology to make healthy and nutritious meals affordable and accessible to all by providing automated nutritious food kiosks/vending machines in workplaces, hospitals and schools. E-Farms is an agricultural focused Fintech company that uses a peer to peer investment platform to enable individuals and organisations with disposable income to invest in agricultural production and commodity trading.

BabyGrubz, Mealimeter and E-Farms will now participate in further mentorship and training provided by BoP Inc prior to competing in the Global SUN Pitch Competition.