Cape Town – From the balcony of her Durbanville home, Debbie Ncube started her own business making a healthy peanut butter.
Her ambition has since seen her product, Eden All Natural, end up in more than 143 stores in Cape Town, Gauteng and the Eastern Cape.
Eden All Natural manufactures
natural peanut butter with 100% Grade A peanuts, slowly roasted in a conventional oven to retain important nutrients.
Ncube began her journey after failing to find affordable peanut butter with no additives, preservatives or sugar on the market and decided to create her own for personal consumption in 2013.
Two years later she started marketing and selling her product among friends and family, and the demand for her peanut butter grew quickly.
She moved on to trade at fairs and malls. And now she employs eight permanent staff members and seasonal workers at her business office in Kensington.
“What motivated me to start Eden All natural was due to lack of natural foods that are affordable and also due to a change in my lifestyle.
“I wanted to live healthily and stay healthy and one of the things that we eat at our home from morning to supper is peanut butter but then I could not find the peanut butter (for) my taste buds, the peanut butter that I love. So I decided to start my own small business,” Ncube said.
“I used to make peanut butter from the age of 3 with my granny and that’s the peanut butter I missed, so I started with the small food processor and at home in my kitchen and it grew from the kitchen into a business.”
Her raw materials are sourced locally, but because of the drought in South Africa, she had to look further afield to Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique.
“The problem we have now is we are at a stage where we feel like we need to grow, we need to take on the world and export but the cash sometimes is just too tight and it does not give you that leverage to do what you want to do.
“Other challenges are rocketing prices and commodities - today peanuts are R50 a kilo and tomorrow they are R100. It’s also a tense economy out there; people are not spending a lot.” Ncube said.
“In 10 years’ time I want to supply the world, I want to be able to export my products from South Africa to the EU, the US, to the whole of Africa and beyond.
“I want to position it for those special people who are very conscious about what they eat,” she added.