A peanut wrapped in a biscuit

Moonsnacks Investment CC was founded by Eddy Nghimwena, an entrepreneur who dropped out of the School of Military Science at the University of Namibia (Unam) at the age of 20. Moonsnacks is a snack food processing and packaging start-up that uses locally sourced agricultural produce and other related ingredients from small-scale farmers to make peanuts more enjoyable.

While in Tanzania in 2018, Nghimwena fell in love with the country’s robust food processing industry.

“Almost every packaged food I consumed there was labelled ‘Made in Tanzania’,” he said. Seeing this branding - which brought a local feel and identity to snacks in that country - inspired Nghimwena to create a Namibian brand which would create the same excitement for its natives. He returned to Namibia to make this a reality. He began sourcing peanuts, the main ingredient, from small-scale farmers in the Kunene and Kavango East regions.

“Most of these farmers sell the peanuts with little to no value added on the informal market at prices which l consider to be below their real worth.

“With Moonsnacks, we not only pay them a fair price for their peanuts, but also pay them extra to sort and peel them for us,” Nghimwena said.

This year, Moonsnacks will be working with up to 10 female farmers in Kavango East to help increase their yields by giving them better yielding seeds and teaching them better agronomic practices.

Next year, the company plans to work with even more farmers as they anticipate the demand for the snack products to grow.

A Sanlam Bridge winner

Nghimwena said after receiving the news that he was one of the winners for the Sanlam Bridge programme, the feeling was surreal and encouraging at the same time.

Amongst all the excitement and emotion, he “had a feeling of sadness for fellow founders who did not win”.

He further added that being a start-up founder is very draining, and in Namibia even more so because there is little financing and assistance.

“I would implore more companies in the private sector to follow in the example of Sanlam Namibia and set up initiatives like this so that more hardworking founders are assisted to grow their businesses and greatly contribute to our countries economy,” he said.

Nghimwena added that he is grateful for the Hunt programme, a pre-incubation programme offered by Sanlam and Start-Up Namibia that allows business owners the opportunity to learn entrepreneurial skills.

“We have gained valuable business skills and insights put to practical use. This has made our journey clearer to know what is required to successfully market the business to potential customers. We have seen favourable results and more productivity.”

The downside

Sharing some challenges he faced while running his business, Nghimwena said the biggest challenge was access to capital for production machinery.

In the local market, gaining exposure and attraction with an unknown product is difficult, especially when “they do not know how it tastes”, he said.

During the first months of operation and until just recently, they would coat the peanut burgers manually, a process which he said is exhausting, and did not produce great results.

“Our biggest accomplishment so far has been building the coating machine. It not only improved the product texture, but also greatly improved our productivity during production and lowered production costs,” he said.

Short-term plans for the business include introducing two new flavours for peanut burgers and growing the product line to over five different snack products that are all sourced, processed and packaged locally.