For more than three decades, Nigerian engineer Segun Emmanuel Olaye has built Ayoola Foods from an export-focused food business into one of Nigeria’s best-known indigenous packaged-food brands.

The idea began while Segun Olaye was studying for a master’s degree at the Odessa Engineering Institute in the former Soviet Union. He struggled to find familiar Nigerian staples such as garri and yam products, turning every shipment from home into an eagerly anticipated event.

After returning to Nigeria in 1984, Olaye founded Ayoola Foods in September 1991, initially targeting Nigerians and Africans living abroad. The company packaged indigenous foods for export to markets including the UK, U.S. and Canada.

The early years were difficult. An export consignment of beans reportedly arrived in London infested with weevils, exposing the challenges of preserving traditional foods for international markets. But the setback helped shape Ayoola’s focus on processing, packaging and quality.

From diaspora brand to Nigerian household name

For more than a decade, Ayoola Foods remained largely export-focused. That changed in 2004 after an elderly Nigerian woman returned from Houston and asked her family to find the packaged fufu she had become accustomed to eating abroad. They could not find it.

The woman eventually traced Ayoola Foods’ office herself, carrying the product wrapper. The encounter forced Olaye to reconsider the company’s assumption that packaged Nigerian food was primarily a diaspora opportunity.

Ayoola subsequently entered the Nigerian market with Poundo Yam, a packaged alternative to the labour-intensive process of preparing traditional pounded yam. Ayoola Foods has long positioned Poundo Yam around its convenience, highlighting its ability to produce pounded yam in less than five minutes. Poundo Yam became Ayoola Foods’ flagship brand and provided a platform for expansion into plantain flour, rice flour, beans flour, cassava fufu, yam flour and other staples.

The distribution decision that accelerated growth

The company’s next major transformation came through distribution.

After opening several depots around Lagos in 2006, Ayoola Foods discovered that maintaining company-owned offices and vehicles was difficult to scale. It subsequently closed the external offices and transferred the vehicles to distributors.

The shift placed more responsibility for market development with independent distributors who understood their territories.

Olaye has said the restructuring became a turning point, with turnover rising from about N900 million to more than N3 billion ($20 million) in 2012. That historical figure is based on Segun Olaye’s account at the Ayoola Foods Annual Customer Forum rather than an independently audited disclosure. The model became central to Ayoola’s expansion, with distributor forums and incentives used to reward high-performing partners.

Building a family food business

Olaye’s wife, Natalie, a Russian food technologist and senior executive, has also played a role in the business, while the next generation has begun entering management, including Ayodele Olaye as an executive director.

Today, Ayoola Foods’ strategy remains rooted in a simple proposition: take familiar Nigerian foods, process them for convenience, maintain quality and build the distribution network needed to put them within consumers’ reach.

What began with Olaye’s difficulty finding Nigerian food abroad has evolved into a broader food-processing business whose growth has been driven not only by manufacturing, but by the way its products reach the market.