Hakeem Jimo: Veggie Victory

“A friend of mine in Germany is called Dr. Tofu. He was the first who did tofu on a commercial scale, in the eighties. They arrested him… for cooking something suspicious… He was arrested a couple of times.

So, when it started in Nigeria and we opened the first vegan restaurant and there were also no vegetarian restaurants, people were saying, that's crazy. Why do you do that? But I knew kind of that time was on our side. - Hakeem Jimo

Hakeem Jimo is the co-founder of Veggie Victory, Nigeria’s first plant-based food tech company. Hakeem and his partner, Bola Adeyanju also founded V Café, Nigeria’s first vegan restaurant in 2013. V Café is in Lagos and serves veganized Nigerian culinary delicacies to vegans, meat eaters and everyone in between.

A few years after opening the restaurant, Hakeem and Bola began producing VChunks, a seitan-based meat alternative that was created to pair beautifully with most Nigerian cuisine.

VChunks are dehydrated so that they can be kept on shelves for months and do not need refrigeration, which is not an option for many in parts of Nigeria.

Hakeem is Nigerian-German, was born and raised in Germany and has lived in West Africa for the past 27 years. Before becoming a vegan food and tech entrepreneur, he worked in journalism and public relations.