Interview with Hadija Jabiri
FOUNDER and MANAGING DIRECTOR, GBRI (EATFRESH)

Lives in: Tanzania

---

Hadija Jabiri is the founder of GBRI, a Tanzanian agribusiness company that started with vegetables and now exports avocados to Europe and India. How we made it in Africa editor-in-chief Jaco Maritz spoke to her about how she built the company with less than $300 in startup capital.

Topics discussed during the interview include:

• Starting a farming business with less than $300
• Securing customers before planting
• Cracking the European market
• The reasons for her success
• Untapped agribusiness opportunities in Tanzania

Watch the full interview below: (only available on howwemadeitinafrica.com)

Interview summary

Hadija Jabiri registered her company, GBRI, while still a first-year business administration student at St Augustine University in Mwanza, a city in northern Tanzania on the shore of Lake Victoria. Her initial idea was to manufacture soap.

She wanted a mass-market product that was used daily and relatively simple to produce. Soap ticked all the boxes. To get started, she began producing small batches at home.

But scaling up required around $100,000 to build a factory – money no bank was willing to lend her.

After failing to secure funding for the soap venture, she began looking for alternative products that required less capital upfront but could still generate a profit.

She settled on vegetable farming. The startup costs were lower and there was steady demand from the local market. It wasn’t the end of her soap-making ambitions – she still hoped to return to that later – but farming was a more practical starting point.

With less than $300, Jabiri began scouting for land in Iringa, a fertile agricultural region in central Tanzania. She found an eight-acre plot but could afford only two acres upfront. The landowners agreed to let her pay off the remaining six acres over two years.

Before planting a single crop, Jabiri had already lined up customers, including supermarkets. Her strategy was clear from the start: secure the order first, then plant.

GBRI began by farming tomatoes, capsicums and onions. The business was generating profits, but everything was reinvested into operations.

To meet growing demand, the company later augmented its own production by sourcing from nearby smallholder farmers.

Supplying local supermarkets, however, became less feasible over time. Many had started importing more produce from Kenya and South Africa, and GBRI, operating at a relatively small scale, couldn’t compete on price. Jabiri began looking further afield.

She learned of growing demand in Europe for crops like snow peas, sugar snap peas and French beans. But exporting came with challenges: obtaining the necessary certifications, building cold storage facilities, and investing in refrigerated transport – capital-intensive requirements she couldn’t meet on her own.

To attract funding, Jabiri knew she needed to expand her network. So she put together a list of people she wanted to meet and share her story with.

One of them was Amina Masenza, the former regional commissioner of Iringa. Jabiri secured a meeting, explained her farming venture, and asked if Masenza would consider mentoring her. Masenza agreed and promised to visit the farm. Two months later, she followed through. Impressed by what she saw, Masenza offered to introduce Jabiri to then-president John Magufuli and said she would also bring the vice president at the time, Samia Suluhu Hassan – now president of Tanzania – for a visit.

A video of Hassan’s visit eventually reached someone at MEDA, a Canadian development organisation. The group later provided GBRI with C$150,000 (around $109,000 at the current exchange rate) in funding. This was the company’s first external capital, and the beginning of more to follow.

GBRI eventually established the EatFresh brand for its export produce and began investing in essential infrastructure – a packhouse with cold rooms and a large refrigerated truck to transport vegetables to the airport.

To find overseas clients, Jabiri turned to the internet. “I always tell people we Googled our way to Europe,” she says. One platform she discovered connected buyers and sellers of horticultural produce online. She took a leap of faith, paid for the service, and GBRI secured its first international customer: a vegetable distributor in Ireland.

GBRI’s list of European clients grew steadily. The company began attending international horticultural trade shows and leveraged Tanzanian embassies abroad to broaden its network.

By the late 2010s, it had built a team of over 40 employees and was sourcing produce from around 150 smallholder farmers.

For about two and a half years, the company exported to Europe using airfreight. But when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, freight costs soared. “The numbers were no longer making sense based on the volumes that we had. We were not making a profit,” Jabiri explains.

Faced with unsustainable costs, she shut down operations for eight months.

To keep the business afloat, Jabiri pivoted to bananas. She discovered that the company’s cold room could be heated and used to ripen bananas instead. GBRI began sourcing bananas from smallholder farmers, ripening them on-site, and selling them in the local market.

This continued for about a year, until the Covid-19 situation began to ease. Hoping to resume exports, the company looked for a crop that didn’t rely on airfreight. It settled on avocados, which could be shipped by sea.

GBRI now sources avocados from more than 10,000 smallholder farmers across Tanzania, and even from neighbouring Burundi.

The company has also expanded into avocado oil processing. Many of the avocados grown by smallholder farmers don’t meet export standards and would otherwise go to waste. GBRI processes these into crude avocado oil, which it currently exports to Portugal and Spain.

“I’m envisioning that in the next 20 years … GBRI will probably be called a group of companies, having many more factories, doing many more businesses along the agriculture value chain,” says Jabiri. There are so many potential opportunities in the country.”