Kemi Jeje is team lead for Whole Eats and Community Pot, two initiatives she founded to tackle health and malnutrition issues in adults and children. In this interview with YETUNDE OLADEINDE, she shares childhood experiences that charted her path, going into food formulation and how she is supporting malnourished children.
What is the initiative all about?
Community Pot is a wellness food business. We believe food should be medicine, so that you do not eat medicine like it is food. We formulate meals for over two years now and we have had great success in the market.
What inspired the idea?
My journey, then ending up with children, was accidental. But my own journey was inspired by the idea of food as medicine.
Tell us what you mean by your personal journey?
I grew up being very sickly. I would just palpitate with no reason for it. Also, I grew up in a white garment church and they thought I was ogbanje, so they kept beating me. However, that didn’t change anything and they said things like, on the day of my wedding I was going to go back. I fell sick every month and when I was sick, people didn’t have sympathy for me. I couldn’t go out with my mates; if I walked a few steps, I would have to sit down. When I got into secondary school, it was the first time I would be attending a public school, and as I was returning from the very first day, it started again. I started palpitating. Then, I saw a woman selling garlic across the road; I don’t know where the idea came from but I went to her and bought and ate it. And it stopped instantly, like magic.
That was the beginning of my journey. Then, I thought that as a babe I could not be smelling of garlic all the time; so I did a bit of research and found out that they were selling odourless garlic. That was how I started taking herbal supplements. At some point, I had painful menstruation; they did agbo for me and all that. As that grew, I took ownership of that journey. At some point even in my marital journey, I was confronted with a lot of medical issues and I got tired of going to the hospital. At some point, some treatments were complicating my life, so I started to find some things and had to go for diploma in herbal medicine.
What did you study before this?
I studied Chemistry. Initially I wasn’t into food but I was into gifts and branding. I never thought I was going to do this. As I found answers, I had to do a lot of juicing at home, taking herbal teas, did a lot of research on the leaves around and their usefulness and many kept wondering what was wrong with me. So, I decided to start making those teas and supplying supermarkets. We all know what lemongrass is good for and you can just go and buy it. Also, juicing became too stressful for what I needed at home; so, I thought that if I set up a business doing it, it would serve me and I would make money.
Let’s distinguish between Community Pot and Whole Eats?
Whole Eats is food formulation; we do organic meals. They are pap like, and they have fruits and nuts infused into them. They are one formulation that is really dense in different kinds of nutrients. Almost fully rounded. And we also do herbal teas for everybody.
For the organic meals, when we first got into the market, we were told that it is only sick people that take pap. You don’t get to experience it, until you taste it. It was in shops for months and people were like ‘how can I buy pap for this price?’ Then, someone just said ‘why don’t you make a version for children that are your market?’ That was COVID period and we went back to produce for children, put it on instagram and we got the first buyer. She was happy with the result at first, then she called me back and asked ‘what is in the meal, my baby is not using the toilet?’ I worked with food scientists and medical doctors and I went back to my team. So we infused certain fruits into it, sent it back to her and she said the metabolism was now even better. Most of the customers we had at the beginning are still our customers. Early this year, we were doing our market review on people that really need this. We have protein meals, meals designed for different things and that is a huge market. How can we reach these people, measure impact, get partners to buy for them and then rehabilitate them and measure impact? That was how we got into the NGO part of it.
Was it easy getting support for it?
It wasn’t but we have been on the road talking to organisations. Individuals responded first but it wasn’t enough. We called that ‘Adopt a Child Recovery’, and after about three weeks, we had about seven children adopted. I was able to get to the MD of Sterling Bank and shared the message and video with him. In an hour, he bought into it and they adopted 188 children.
Are these children in Lagos or spread all over the country?
For now, they are in Lagos because we really need to track. We are talking to implementors outside Lagos, where the need is actually higher, especially in the North. This is the pilot phase and the target is to adopt 500 children, and have a data so that if we are work ing outside Lagos, we have an idea of what to do. Even now, we have some dropout rates. As at the beginning of August, we had 104 children and yesterday we had about 12 children that had dropped out. One of the reasons is that some children don’t take any food that doesn’t have milk. And we don’t have milk partnership yet. Also, some of the women are not stable; if you go to them in the communities, by the time you go back to reimburse, they are not around. So, those are the things we used to monitor the pilot and we then have a structure as we move on.
The idea of the name Community Pot is that it takes a community to raise a child. You can go to any of your neighbour’s house and they would offer you food. So if you see that child that you are adopting as that child in your neighbourhood, then you might give. That is what we are doing.
Malnutrition is a major issue now that food items are expensive, how are you going to help solve that?
I believe that every chronic illness is borne out of malnutrion. There are two areas to malnutrition – under-nutrition and over-indulgence. So, the class of the diabetes that the adults get to deal with in terms of blood sugar and cholesterol is usually over indulgence. We all have cravings; everyone has their own type of cravings and sometimes you over indulge in it. Four is in four segments, the sweets, the sour, bitter and the last one. If you keep taking the sweet, you run the body out of balance. That is why we are focusing on the children that are undernourished; why they give them eba and the micro nutrients are missing, especially for their cognitive development. You ask a child to read ABC and he is just looking at you. That child has as much potentials as the child that is doing well but just does not have the opportunity. The bad thing for under nutrition for children is that part of it is not reversible, once they get past that stage. You cannot go back to that part of development again. And that is the quality of people that we are going to have in the community. We are not looking at what would happen in the next 20 years when the children are malnourished.
You have talked about the two sides of the coin but there are also a number of adulterated foods. How do you solve that?
For me, my preference is local. There is so much we can do about that – become farmers and grow our own food. Of course, we are not yet there. But, I believe that if you stay local as much as possible, the chances are reduced. Also if you stay balanced, the body has a way of eliminating toxins, especially with bitter foods for us, adults.