Olagoke Balogun is a Nigerian entrepreneur who, like many business owners across the globe, was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, he didn’t allow that to deter his dreams, as he looked for more innovative ways to offer products to people that need them. Today, he has changed his fortunes and is on course to make over one billion Naira in sales from his startup.
With 13 years of operation, Olagoke Balogun has grown his brand – So Fresh, from a mall startup of only a few employees to a global brand and leader in the fresh juice and salad sector. He currently boasts of 12 state-of-the-art stores across Nigeria, with many more in the pipeline.
According to him, the company is on the path to turning over a billion Naira ($2.5 million) in sales this year, and plans are underway to expand operations with the establishment of 20 more stores within the next couple of years.
Interestingly, Olagoke Balogun didn’t dream of becoming a businessman. His dream was to become a medical practitioner, but that was not the case. He graduated with a degree in Biochemistry from the University of Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria, and spent many years working in different sectors of the economy.
He worked as a restaurant manager and worked nine years in an oil and gas company.
“There was a five-month break when I was looking for a job, and I traveled from Ilorin to Lagos. I then started thinking about business and [started] selling fruits and vegetables because I grew up eating fresh foods, and Ilorin is an agrarian state, so I thought it might be good to do that,” he says.
He said his orientation changed when he travelled to South Africa and noticed that local fruit juice was packaged and sold in Supermarkets, unlike in Nigeria, where all the fruit juice were chemical supplements imported from Europe and China.
“So, when I came back, I started thinking about that business, and I shared the idea with my wife, and she liked it, and that was it. We decided to give it a try and see what we could do with it. The original vision was to have a farmers’ market where we sold fruits and vegetables in an organized format, and that is how we started.
“When we started, we realized the type of customers we were attracting was the busy working class who wanted prepared meals like salads and fruit already cut. So, in 2010, we started experimenting, and it was a time when eating salads and smoothies was not a thing in Nigeria. So, we started making juices and smoothies, and customers liked them, so we gave fruit packs a try and salads a try, and the business evolved from there.”
“We struggled for a long time because the location wasn’t too great. We actually considered closing down the business a couple of years in because we had put in a lot of money and effort, and it wasn’t yielding [results], and we were supporting the business with my salary and my wife’s money from her private law practice,” recalls Balogun.
In 2013, Olagoke Balogun said that he needed to make a huge business decision to relocate the company from the mainland to the Island – the wealthy neighbourhood of Ikoyi in Victoria Island, Lagos.
“We believed that there was potential and we found out that the type of people we were attracting were more on the Island and after the move, in less than six months, the business [had] a turnaround and revenues started growing astronomically and it was so good at that point that we couldn’t manage the two stores and we closed the Ogba store and focused on Ikoyi,” says Balogun.
He added that his major breakthrough came when his company raised over €360,000 ($424,000) from investors, which enabled him to open 11 more stores within a short period. Now, the rest is history.
