It was a 180 degree turn. One minute Tayrene Mugridge was modeling on catwalks in Milan, Japan, the United States and Belgium; the next she was baking bread.
It all began when she was a toddler, when her late grandmother baked beer bread every Sunday.
“I used to be with granny and I’d say ‘granny, can I please pour the beer?’ It was a ‘you fight over it with your sister’, kind of thing,” says Mugridge.
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“I used to make this as Christmas presents back in the day in a glass jar, with a ‘Happy Christmas’ label and a picture of a cat. All the ladies got a brownie mix and all the boys got a beer bread mix.”
The origin of the recipe is obscure. What is clear is that it was passed on from grandmother to Mugridge’s mother and then to Mugridge herself. It was she who vowed to turn the bread into a business. It was an idea that Mugridge came up with while making herself up for modeling.
Modeling was her life nearly a decade ago. After completing high school, she left for the fashion shows of the world—and all the lights and glamour that goes with it. When she returned to South Africa, with no university education, modeling was her only way to make a living.
She was worn-out by life on the catwalk, so she started a model booking agency which she ran for around eight years. But she grew tired of the business as well.
“I came home one day and said I was sick of it. I asked my fiancé if I could quit my job and he said, ‘yes, go for it’. And then I said, ‘but what am I going to do?’ And he said, ‘well, do the beer bread’. I looked at him and asked him if he was crazy. Who wants to buy beer bread? This was something I did on the weekends; I didn’t think it could be a career. And then it was,” she says.
It took two months without a paycheck to nudge Mugridge into giving the beer bread business a chance. The recipe was there, the flavors could be added. All that was left was the packaging and six months later she launched Barrett’s Ridge Beer Bread in August 2012.
“It has just taken off. I thought I’d be sitting at markets on the weekends begging people to buy my bread, but it’s going well,” she admits.
“I sent out a couple of drop boxes to some of the bloggers, I took it to some of the delis and orders started coming in. I got the website, Facebook and Twitter up and running, which is a great way of advertising, especially when you’re starting out and can’t afford marketing.”
Three months after launching Barrett’s Ridge Beer Bread, Mugridge received a message from an online kitchen store, Yuppiechef, via Twitter. They were starting a pantry section on their website and wanted to sell her beer bread.
Yuppiechef’s first order was quite small, Mugridge says, but then they asked for around 800 units.
“I managed to give them 400 loaves. I then called them and said I was sorry and would give them the other half later during the following week,” she remembers.
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At the time, Mugridge was doing everything on her own, with the help of her fiancé. She made the beer bread mix, cut the material, stitched the packaging by hand and folded labels from her house. But this was a sign that she couldn’t do all the work alone.
As the orders increased, she outsourced the work to Zimele Packaging Solutions where they mixed the ingredients and did the packaging. This enabled Mugridge to focus on the management side of the business.
Today, without any marketing and just her website and social networking sites, Barrett’s Ridge Beer Bread is exported to Namibia and Australia and exporting over two tons to Britain in December. The bread is mostly sold at delis and some grocery stores in South Africa.
“I didn’t really realize how powerful social media was until I started tweeting and Facebooking… the distributor from Namibia found us on Facebook and she was coming to Cape Town to meet some of her suppliers. So she popped in for a meeting and we took it from there,” Mugridge says.
Some people complain that the bread is salty.
“Then I ask them, ‘what beer did you use?’” she says. The beer changes the flavor of the bread.
A simple recipe from her grandmother has helped Mugridge become a successful beer bread baker. It turns over around R150,000 ($14,000) a month.
“I asked my mom, ‘do you think granny would mind if I’m making money off her idea?’ She said ‘No, not at all. Not if you pay for me to go on a nice holiday.’”
And that’s the way the beer bread crumbles.

From Top Model Gear  To Baking With Beer

It all started with R40 ($4) and a neighbor’s oven. A year later, Espinaca Innovations is a bakery on a mission to make money by getting people in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape province to eat bread packed with spinach.
Espinaca, meaning spinach in Spanish, is where Nomjana bakes about 40 loaves and umpteen muffins every day. But the idea didn’t come by easily.
Nomjana started off selling clothes in his community of Khayelitsha, just outside Cape Town, to make a living. But he knew he needed something of his own, something innovative.
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A year before attending the Raymond Ackerman Academy, Nomjana decided to change his lifestyle and became a vegetarian. As he read a newspaper article about diabetic patients standing in long queues at hospitals, it spurred the spinach bread idea. It could be the answer for many people.
“I knew spinach was something that is a solution to my society due to the fact that it grows [all year], it’s versatile and it’s nutritious. I did my research, and found it was the most nutritious vegetable in the world,” adds Nomjana.
While attending the Academy, in partnership with the University of Cape Town, Nomjana was able to improve his entrepreneurial skills. The Academy is a post-matric level institution offering studies in entrepreneurial development.
Espinaca Innovations was a great idea on paper but implementing it proved to be a challenge. The only problem was that nobody was interested at the time.
“Eventually I just sat down and said let me use what I have and during that time I had nothing but the intellectual capital and $4 in my pocket. And I didn’t have an oven. I was living in a shack (a tin roof house) in a backyard with my wife. We were just dating at the time,” Nomjana says.
But he knew that he couldn’t operate this kind of business from a shack. So he asked a neighbor if he could bake bread in her oven when she was not using it.
In February last year, with his neighbor’s oven and R40 ($4), Nomjana sold about 200 loaves in 25 days. He grows the spinach in his backyard in about 20 crates and enriches the bread with it.
All good so far but Nomjana soon realized that he was not making enough money with the borrowed oven so he approached Pick ’n Pay (a grocery store owned by millionaire Raymond Ackerman) for assistance.
“That’s when they assisted with a four burner oven of my own I could use on a daily basis and at night as well. I spent my time baking lots of breads and going to the field and selling to people on the street, which I’m still doing now. Like going to train stations and selling door-to-door,” says Nomjana.
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The grocery store placed Espinaca Innovations into their small business incubation until it was big enough to become a supplier.
He now supplies the Pick ’n Pay head office canteen.
With the grocery store’s assitance Nomjana was able to bake more loaves but distribution became an issue as he was producing more bread than he could sell.
The solution was delivering bread on bicycles. He partnered with a crowd funding platform which helped to raise around R11,200 ($1,000) in two months. It enabled Nomjana to buy five bicycles to deliver bread.
Today, Nomjana has a wider range of spinach products, ranging from spinach muffins, sandwiches using the spinach bread, juices and smoothies.
These spinach products are sold and delivered to orphanages, pre-schools, and homes in Khayelitsha. He also supplies Spar, a grocery store chain, in Khayelitsha.
Nomjana will soon establish his own premises where he would be able to sell all his spinach products. He hopes to be able to turn the idea into a franchise across townships in the Western Cape.
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On The Crust Of Something Big

Johannesburg entrepreneur Chris Pienaar was hungry for profits and it was bread which fed this hunger. He set up Straight to Your Door bread deliveries in Alexandra—one of Johannesburg’s oldest townships, which is affectionately referred to as ‘Alex’—more than two years ago. He started out with just R20 ($2.40) to buy stock and made a R2 ($0.24) profit on his first sale. In July, those numbers grew to around R23,000 ($2,756).
“In Alex people can wait up to 40 minutes in supermarket queues just to buy fresh bread every day. That’s when I realized bringing bread to people’s doors would be something Alex residents would be happy to pay for,” he says.
But closing this gap and turning it into a business opportunity only became a reality when Pienaar joined forces with the Awethu Project, an entrepreneurs’ incubation program based at Constitution Hill.
Awethu, meaning ‘ours’ in Nguni languages, was launched by Yusuf Randera-Rees, a Harvard and Oxford graduate, who cut his teeth working for a Swiss bank and returned to South Africa in 2009. His objective was to merge his Harvard training and insights with the entrepreneurial potential of South Africa’s townships. He wasn’t out to establish a charity but a business model that would see entrepreneurs and Awethu’s partners make mutual profits. Entrepreneurs have to give half of their new profits to Awethu.
“At Harvard and Oxford I saw an almost proven record of success but it wasn’t necessarily because the students were all exceptional,” says Randera-Rees.
What was exceptional, Randera-Rees noted, was that his peers had access to quality education, mentors, infrastructure and the halo effect of being associated with the world’s most respected business schools.
“I was angry that so much entrepreneurial potential in South Africa was being wasted just because people didn’t have access to opportunities.”
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By 2010, Randera-Rees had secured corporate sponsorship, funding from treasury’s job fund, staff members and a heavyweight list of patrons and advisory board members. He could pilot the project, which he and university friend Ryan Parker had first conceived as Oxford students when they entered the university’s 21st Century Challenge. The winning social-entrepreneurship projects had to be sustainable, show financial returns and produce social and environmental benefits. The pair’s business incubation idea got top 10 spot in the competition.
Pienaar joined the first Awethu workshop held in Alexandra and the match was obvious from the start.
“Chris was great at every problem solving exercise we gave to the entrepreneurs. And when he did undergo the testing process we had devised he scored in the top percentages of anyone in the world,” says Randera-Rees.
Pienaar, who was a less-than-successful beer seller when he joined the workshop, recognized Awethu’s fresh take on hackneyed buzz phrases of job creation and poverty alleviation.
“This was about getting practical business training, partnering with Awethu to use their networks and then having the guts and initiative to make it happen,” he says.
It is about steady growth and making real profits that also factor in Awethu’s cut. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. That is why Awethu’s key to success is to select the right entrepreneurs with which to partner.
Over the next 18 months they aim to have 1,000 thriving entrepreneurs. It all begins with the workshops, which aim to reach around 13,000 entrepreneurs who will be provided with a free two hour business course. Applicants don’t need a minimum level of education, business experience or capital. Like Pienaar, they don’t even need an investable idea. They only need to come from an underprivileged background and prove, after the workshop and testing process, that they have what it takes to become entrepreneurs. From the 13,000 a core group of 1,000 will be identified to partner with Awethu’s mentors to start on the incubation process.
Pienaar has become a mentor and trainer himself. He says his success disproves that township youth are doomed to fail. Straight To Your Door works because he understands his market and his customers’ needs. It makes money because the ideas are polished by mentors; have the confidence of acquired business skills and the thumbs up from those who are part of powerful business networks. Pienaar has not stopped doing the grunt work and he is constantly adapting the responsiveness of his business strategies.
“I know me and I know Alexandra. The bread deliveries work because we’re doing them in the afternoon when people are at home, not rushing around and trying to find change to pay. We can also do deliveries quickly because the homes are close together and this means you save time, you keep your customers happy and so you can sell more bread and make more profit,” he says.
Today, Pienaar has six employees and is looking to partner with other entrepreneurs who want to sell door to door. He’s been able to piggyback on Awethu to seal significant deals with large established brands that now recognize his successful track record.
“My granny is so proud of me. She sold fatcakes for a living but we lived from hand-to-mouth, now I’m a person who gets respect and people come to for business advice,” says Pienaar.
Randera-Rees is also proud. Pienaar is exactly the kind of success story Awethu needs to reach their target of 1,000 ace entrepreneurs and to prove the strange but beautiful alchemy that can happen when Harvard and ‘Alex’ meet.

Tag: Bread

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On The Crust Of Something Big

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