By Style Reporter
Fast-rising food production and processing company Amandla Brands recently won the $12 000 CBZ Youth Entrepreneurship Programme (YEP) award under the Start Up Business category.
Sympathy Sibanda-Mazuruse, MD of the company, said the award was a big endorsement for their brand and they were hoping for more growth moving into the future.
“The Amandla Brands initiative was birthed from our passion to start a brand and grow our own brand as a vision of the main company, Esteem Communications,” she said.
“Esteem Communications is a public relations and brand development company we started in 2014 and Amandla Brands was, therefore, designed to demonstrate that brand development acumen through initiating our own brand from zero as compared to doing that as consultancy for established businesses.
“Yes, we are running the consultancy under the mother company, but Amandla Brands makes a good statement about our brand development drive and capabilities.”
Amandla Brands boasts of a sound empowerment chain, ranging from providing livelihoods for women and men who grow the groundnuts in rural Zaka under Masvingo province, to provision of high-standard and organically grown products.
“Amandla’s multi-tiered mandate is the control of the food value chain to enhance the adoption of traditional and healthy lifestyles. We are also empowering rural men and women in rural Masvingo who are helping us with the groundnuts farming,” Sibanda-Mazuruse said.
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The Amandla Brands boss highlighted that they were grateful for the support and mentoring they got through CBZ and Empowered Life Trust in the 2018 to 2019 Youth Entrepreneurship Programme and they were now geared for more growth.
“Amandla Brands is a fast growing subsidiary which provides healthy foods like organic peanut butter, variations of nuts, brown rice, brown rice flour and seasoned corn with a desire to retrace to our traditional way of life in a modern way. All this is to help combat the prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDS) like cancer diabetes and high blood pressure,” she said.
“We are, thus, elated with the mentoring opportunity we got under the CBZ programme and from henceforth we are going all out. Our plan is to have a whole range of products under Amandla Brands and from the intellectual rights registration we undertook we can go up to 50 products.”
For a company that only started in April 2018, Amandla Brands has demonstrated great initiative and innovation, thanks to the mother company’s public relations and brand development bias.
“Having been established in April 2018, we have managed to get our peanut butter on the retail market and it has been a hit with foreigners from various countries like Japan, Belgium, South Africa and the Netherlands,” the MD said.
“We also aim to be inclusive, meaning that we have adverts that are aimed for the deaf community as well as targeted campaigns for schoolchildren. Our brand development acumen and the support from stakeholders has helped us to weather the storm even under a challenging environment.”
The food production enthusiast also thanked YEP for the various opportunities it availed to their remarkably growing brand.
“Through the training in YEP, we have learnt to network and innovate, hence the introduction of our newest baby, Amandla Kids, which focuses on baby foods like purees, cereals and juices.This new innovation is still in the process of certification and the sky is the limit,” Sibanda-Mazuruse said.
She highlighted that theirs was a family business and the unity of purpose in the family was creating more avenues for growth.
“My business partner and husband Takemore Mazuruse is a brand strategist and shrewd marketer, while my own mother is well-versed with peanut butter production knowledge. My mother-in-law helps with the groundnuts production in Masvingo, while my sisters as well as brothers-in-law come in with various expertise including financial management as well as audio visual production for the enterprise.
“I am really grateful to God for the blessing of family. Over and above that, the market has been very responsive and the general populace supportive.”
Sibanda-Mazuruse also highlighted that the mentoring and prize money was a good shot in the arm for Esteem Communications and Amandla Brands as they were in the process of expanding their business and reaching out to new markets.
“The award could not have come at a better time. Our business is growing fast and we really needed such mentoring as well as the various opportunities that come with winning the prize money,” she said.
Guest of honour at the YEP awards dinner, Rudo Chitiga, who is the secretary for Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprise Development, thanked CBZ for empowering young entrepreneurs highlighting that there was no better way to contribute to national development than through such a plausible initiative.
