About - Chaku Foods

Early Beginnings

Founder's story

Our founder & CEO, Nikki grew up in Kumasi, Ghana, just two hours away from some of the smallholder farmers Chaku Foods serves today.

When she was five, her family relocated to Massachusetts, USA, seeking better educational opportunities. This foundation paved the way for Nikki to earn her B.A. from Northwestern University and accumulate vital professional expertise at Google and globally with VISA Inc. across San Francisco, Johannesburg, and Dubai.

"In 2013, while growing merchant payments across Africa, Nikki realized that smallholder farmers were entirely left out of the continent's rapid retail payment boom."

Driven to close this gap, she left VISA to build Chaku Foods while pursuing her MBA at Harvard. Under her leadership, Chaku Foods won the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge in 2021 and Nikki was selected as a prestigious Mulago Rainer Fellow in 2023.

Quick overview of Chaku Foods

Mission and Model

Chakula means food in Swahili. “Chaku” is a short version that honors our Pan-African aspirations. Our mission is to create generational wealth for African smallholder farmers. Through our ChakuTech platform, we aim to add billions of dollars in additional income for millions of smallholder African farmers who lack access to markets due to lack of information on location of their farms, traceability and harvest timing of their crops, and aggregating capacity for small farm sizes.

Map

We map farmer lands using high-resolution drone imagery and advanced geo-spatial data to build physical records and visual coordinates for smallholder farms.

Predict

We predict crop yields using custom machine learning models to forecast harvest quantities and timing, reducing supply chain volatility.

Collect

We collect premium quality harvests to aggregate supply for large-scale processors, aggregators, and global fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies.