My Wapishi Journey

"These tomatoes are unusable. That's the third delivery this week we've had to reject."

I watched as the head manager, inspected a delivery that had just arrived by motorbike. The rider had raced to the entrance, produce bouncing precariously in plastic crates, but speed couldn't mask quality issues.

This scene struck a chord. During my internship at Foodpanda in Southeast Asia, I'd developed a fascination with food supply chains – the invisible networks that connect farms to tables. When I returned to Kenya, I expected to find evolved systems. Instead, I discovered a fragmented puzzle where restaurants and farmers both lost daily.

As we continued our lunch, the rejected vegetables sat in a growing pile by the kitchen door. My friend explained their weekly struggle: inconsistent quality, unpredictable deliveries, and prices that fluctuated without warning.

"How do you plan a menu when you don't know what ingredients will actually arrive?" he asked.

That question planted the seed for what would become Wapishi.

The Disconnection

Kenya's food system was trapped in an ironic paradox: restaurants couldn't reliably source fresh produce, while farmers struggled to find consistent buyers. Between them stood a fragmented distribution network where information moved slower than the food itself.

The math was heartbreaking:

• Farmers losing 30% of potential income to middlemen

• Kitchens overpaying by 25% for inconsistent quality

• Food waste at nearly every step of the journey

Behind these numbers were real people: a chef unable to plan her menu for tomorrow, a farmer uncertain if his harvest would sell, kitchen staff working overtime to salvage what they could.

Building Bridges

"What if we could connect them directly?" became the question that launched Wapishi.

With a three-person team, we began building a platform that would do something deceptively simple: create direct connections between commercial kitchens and the farmers who could supply them.

The technical challenges were substantial:

• Creating interfaces that worked for both tech-savvy restaurant managers and farmers with basic feature phones

• Building logistics optimization that accounted for Nairobi's unpredictable traffic patterns

• Integrating M-Pesa payments to ensure farmers got paid immediately

But the human challenges were even greater. We needed to build trust in a system where mistrust had been the norm. Farmers who had been burned before. Kitchen managers who couldn't risk their reputation on promised deliveries that might never arrive.

The First Connection

I'll never forget our first successful transaction: a small order of tomatoes, onions, and plantains from a farm in Kirinyaga to a kitchen in Kilimani.

It wasn't the technology that made it special. It was watching the farmer, Mwangi, count the payment that arrived instantly on his phone—25% more than he usually received. It was seeing Chef Irene inspect the produce that had traveled directly from farm to kitchen in under three hours instead of changing hands four times over two days.

"This is the freshest delivery we've had in months," she said, already planning tomorrow's menu with new confidence.

Growth and Impact

That single connection grew into a network. Within months, our platform was serving 30+ commercial kitchens and generating over KES 6M in annual farmer income.

Each transaction strengthened the system:

• Kitchens gained reliable access to quality ingredients

• Farmers secured stable, fair-priced markets for their produce

• Both sides reduced waste and increased profits

We secured three distribution partnerships, including one with Wasoko, extending our reach beyond what our small team could have achieved alone.

But the metrics that mattered most weren't in our dashboards. They were in the stories:

• The farmer who could finally pay school fees without taking loans

• The restaurant that reduced food costs enough to hire two more staff

• The reduced food waste in a country where hunger remains a daily reality

View Wapishi

The Lesson

My time with Wapishi taught me that technology's greatest power isn't in its complexity but in its ability to remove barriers between people who should be connected but aren't.

The most elegant code I wrote wasn't the payment integration or the logistics algorithm. It was the simple messaging notification that let a chef now that his order is scheduled and he could take that to the bank.

That direct human connection—the elimination of unnecessary middlemen and layers of complexity—became a principle I've carried forward in every project since.

Sometimes the most meaningful innovation isn't creating something new, but simply clearing the path between people who need each other but haven't found their way to connect.

This article is part of my startup journey series. For more stories about building technology that matters in Kenya and beyond, follow me at kuria.pro and view wapishi here