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Posted by Felix Okoli on Friday July 10, 2015 at 12:52:48:

There is a woman I know that makes good money selling one of the cheapest foods in Nigeria and that is Akara. She sells it with bread too and an ordinary Nigerian can get a full stomach with just N100. She sells a piece of Akara for N10 while she also sells small loaves of bread for N50 each and people normally queue up at her place just to buy it because it's cheap and tastes good too.

Akara is one of the most popularly eaten foods in Nigeria and it's a proteinous food that is made from beans after it has been grounded and fried with oil. The ground beans is mixed with water and then other ingredients like pepper and salt are added to make it taste good. It is then fried in a pan of heated groundnut oil till it turns brown from white.

Mama Nkechi started the business of frying Akara because as a housewife and a mother, the best thing she is good at is in cooking and this is helping her send her kids to school and provide food for the family.

Her business model is simple. She normally buys a bag of beans at a discount and other ingredients like groundnut oil, prepares them before selling them at ready to eat food. She saves money by not having any physical store and so doesn't pay rent while also working just in the early hours of the morning selling her food only for breakfast. Her cooking tools are a frying plan, a small gas cooker, spoon and basin.

She normally comes to her roadside store with ready to fry ground beans and it only takes her about 5 minutes to fry Akara for her every ready customers. She gets at least 100 customers in the morning and each one buys spends at least N100 per order generating a sale of about N10,000 for hear every morning.

Mama Nkechi now makes more money than her husband who was barely making enough for the family but the husband is not complaining unlike some other Nigerian men. Some Nigerian men won't want their wives to sell food by the roadside but in the case of Mama Nkechi, he hubby agreed because it's better to throw away shame and work hard to survive than to die in laziness.

Mama Nkechi has a growing number of customers and she projects that in 6 months, their numbers would have doubled but she is not complaining giving that life is better for her now unlike in the past when she was practically begging for money.

Akara is one of the fastest selling ready to eat foods in Nigeria but there are very few people involved in the business and the few ones normally have a large number of people crowding to buy it.

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Comments:
Re: How Mama Nkechi makes money selling Akara and bread Reply by james on Monday July 20, 2015 at 16:12:52:

i like mama because her buness and her husband no compiniy her that is good life.

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