The expensive life of Twiga Foods

Spend enough time around venture capital in emerging markets, and you keep hearing the same ambition: modernising the informal economy.

Look at Nairobi, Kenya. Tens of thousands of neighbourhood kiosks sell bananas, tomatoes, and cooking oil, yet getting those goods from a smallholder farmer to a shop can involve four or five informal brokers, each taking a cut. Much of the trade still runs through wholesale markets, driven by handwritten ledgers, cash, and little technology.

To a software investor, this looks like friction waiting to be swept away by software. If you can aggregate demand on a mobile app, run a fleet of delivery trucks, build modern packhouses, and disintermediate the brokers, you can lower consumer prices, pay farmers more, and capture a fat margin in the middle.

Twiga Foods raised roughly $185.4 million from blue-chip backers, including Goldman Sachs, the International Finance Corporation, and French private equity firm Creadev, to test this exact hypothesis. At its peak, the platform handled up to 12,000 daily deliveries across twelve Kenyan cities, serving 140,000 retailers and moving two million kilogrammes of produce each day.

In August and September 2026, Twiga’s operating entities entered statutory administration under Kenya’s Insolvency Act. As it turned out, across twelve years of operation, the enterprise had never once made a profit.

The disintermediation trap

The trouble with disrupting informal food logistics is that the system is already ruthlessly efficient. It just works in ways that rarely look impressive on paper.

Traditional brokers survive in fresh produce because they carry almost zero fixed overheads. They do not lease temperature-controlled staging depots, retain software development teams, or pay corporate governance retainers. When produce begins to soften under the midday sun, an open-air trader immediately slashes prices to clear the crate before sunset.

Twiga replaced this informal agility with fixed corporate expenses:

• Modern cold-chain staging and enterprise routing software added overheads that exceeded the gross margin available between farm-gate wholesale and street-corner retail.
• Informal retailers operate with scarce working capital and purchase in tiny daily quantities. Delivering micro-orders to thousands of kiosks daily incurred vehicle operating and fuel costs that dwarfed the basket values.
• When Twiga priced produce to reflect its actual logistics infrastructure, vendors returned to the local wholesale market; when it discounted to win market share, it lost money on every delivery run.

During the era of ultra-low interest rates, consecutive venture rounds absorbed these deficits. But top-line volume just scaled the rate of cash consumption.

Let us grow some onions

When a venture-backed intermediary finds that sourcing produce from smallholder farmers is unpredictable and difficult to manage, it faces a familiar choice. Narrow the business or take control of more of the supply chain. Twiga chose the latter.

In May 2022, the company committed approximately $10 million to launch Twiga Fresh, a commercial farming subsidiary. It secured 1,606 acres across Taita Taveta and joined the state-backed Galana-Kulalu irrigation scheme, intending to grow 150,000 tons of onions, tomatoes, and watermelons annually.

Commercial agriculture, however, is not a software feature. It immediately exposed Twiga to weather variability, pests and high direct labour costs. Instead of derisking supply, Twiga tied up liquid capital in agricultural assets just as the global technology funding market began to contract.

At the same time, Twiga committed to a build-to-suit central fulfillment centre at the Tatu City Special Economic Zone (SEZ). It was an advanced facility equipped with commercial cold-storage lines, offices, and staging yards. Yet it was sized for a scale of consumer demand that domestic inflation soon erased. The commercial lease became an onerous liability that internal revenues could not support. By early 2026, creditors filed a High Court petition seeking the formal liquidation of Twiga Tatu SEZ Limited over unpaid rent.

The cloud bill and the landlord

In startup lore, companies falter when they fail to raise their next equity round. In corporate reality, companies enter insolvency because an unglamorous vendor loses patience.

In late 2023, Incentro Africa, a Google Cloud reseller, filed an insolvency petition to liquidate Twiga over an overdue balance of $261,878 stemming from a multi-year cloud contract. While Twiga obtained temporary injunctions and eventually settled the matter, the public spectacle damaged vendor relationships. More than a hundred commercial suppliers suspended trade terms and demanded immediate cash on delivery.

Twiga secured a $35 million convertible debt round in December 2023 from Creadev and Juven to stabilise the ship. Rather than financing operations, the money went towards clearing overdue supplier debts to avoid liquidation.

The funding also brought boardroom rupture. In January 2024, co-founder Peter Njonjo resigned from the board of directors, noting that operational and strategic control had shifted to foreign private equity investors. Former Jumia Kenya executive Charles Ballard was brought in as chief executive to execute retrenchment.

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The art of NewCo

In April 2025,

internal strategy slides
were leaked to the media, revealing a corporate plan codenamed “Project Easter”:

• The documents outlined transferring core assets, intellectual property, software, and customer lists to a clean entity (“NewCo”) and shifting warehousing from Tatu City to a leaner facility in Syokimau.
• Out of 435 remaining staff, 319 were designated for exit—concentrated in supply chain operations (267 positions)—retaining a skeleton team of 10 to 12 people to manage third-party logistics.
• Disputed severance pay, vendor debts, and the contentious Tatu City lease were to remain behind inside the legacy legal entities.

Management dismissed the disclosure as theoretical contingency planning. Shortly thereafter, Twiga’s operating entities were quietly renamed: Twiga Foods One Limited became GT Flow Limited, and Twiga Foods Limited became Templar Field Limited. By August and September 2026, both entities were placed into statutory administration under administrator Mohamed A. Mohamed, freezing creditor claims.

The verdict

Public reaction across African technology forums and social media was unsympathetic. Local market participants largely agreed that foreign venture capital had tried to solve a social and working-capital problem with software and debt.

Commentators noted the irony of spending tens of millions on corporate overheads while informal kiosks continued to run their businesses on low margins, relying on trusted personal networks, handwritten credit records, and morning physical inspections at marketplaces. Newer competitors like

Kapu
opted for asset-light pickup agent models rather than owning logistics fleets, drawing direct lessons from Twiga’s experience.

Ultimately, Twiga Foods demonstrated that venture capital subsidies can accelerate customer acquisition, but they cannot change unit economics. When the cheap funding evaporated, the platform left an administrator reviewing unpaid vendor claims and a reminder that building an expensive logistics apparatus atop paper-thin retail margins is a perilous way to run a business.

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Kenn Abuya

Kenn Abuya is a senior reporter at TechCabal. He leads the Startups Desk.

Thank you for reading this far. Feel free to email kenn[at]bigcabal.com, with your thoughts about this edition of NextWave. Or just click reply to share your thoughts and feedback.