There is a question Jennifer Adebisi has answered more times than she can count. It comes from investors, mostly, and it goes something like this: Are you building a tech company or a food company?
The answer, she will tell you, is both. But that answer, she has learned, is the problem.
“Food tech is too operational for Software as a Service (SaaS) investors,” she says. “But it is too tech-driven for traditional hospitality capital.”
Adebisi sits in the gap between them, building something that does not fit neatly into either world.
This is not a small problem. It shapes everything: how she raises money, how she is valued, how fast she can grow. And it is a problem, she argues, that reveals something broken about how Nigeria’s tech ecosystem thinks about consumer businesses.
From Uli to the professional kitchen
Adebisi came to technology through food, not the other way around. She grew up partly with her grandmother in Uli, Anambra State, in the South-Eastern part of Nigeria, who farmed her own food and cooked everything from scratch.
That early life shaped a deep belief in food as something beyond fuel for the body.
“Food is nourishment, food is medicine, food is comfort,” she says. “Nothing is more personal.”
In 2017, Adebisi graduated from Red Dish Chronicles Culinary School, a culinary school in Lagos and Abuja, and then moved to a Head Chef position at Sabor Lagos, a casual restaurant in the heart of Lagos, the following year.
During her time as a head chef, competitors attempted to poach her, she says: “They’d come to me and ask if I knew someone who was as good as me, and I got an idea, to create a service to link people looking for chefs and the chefs themselves. Uche and I called it Prime Chef.”
Prime Chef didn’t get off the ground at that stage due to problems surrounding the technical side of launching, but that was Adebisi’s first foray into technology.
In 2021, Adebisi became Chief Culinary Officer and co-founder at FoodCourt, a YC-backed food tech startup, handling operations and quality control on the food end of the business.
The operations side of that business exposed her, for the first time, to what technology could actually do. Not as a glamorous thing, but as a practical one.
“Yes, you can build a nice app,” she says. “But the app is just the front. The real work exists in the operations. That is where your money lives.”
Adebisi and her business partner, Uche Banye, left FoodCourt in July 2023. When they cofounded Happy Belly in September 2023, they brought that conviction with them.
They were, by their own description, non-technical founders. They had no engineering background. But they knew exactly what they needed the technology to do because they had spent years inside the operations that the technology was supposed to serve.
Happy Belly is a customer-facing app; a proprietary kitchen management system called Kina; a logistics app for riders; a vendor management network; a dark kitchen; and, soon, a WhatsApp ordering channel.
Adebisi says she built each piece out of necessity because the technology tools available in the market did not solve the actual problems she was facing.
“There is hardly any part of our operation that we do not have in hand,” she says.
The funding gap nobody names
When Adebisi pitches Happy Belly to investors, she runs into a version of the same wall from different directions.
SaaS investors look at her unit economics and see capital expenditure: dark kitchens, equipment, riders, and packaging. They compare her to global food delivery platforms and ask why her growth does not look like DoorDash. “Local infrastructure costs are not being priced into their expectations,” she says.
Traditional hospitality investors, on the other hand, do not quite follow the technology story. They understand restaurants. They do not understand why a food business needs to build its own kitchen operating system, or what the long-term value of proprietary logistics software looks like.
“We are an unofficial infrastructure company,” Adebisi says. “It is real estate intensive, people intensive, capital intensive. Investors who typically fund SaaS are not looking for capex. And traditional investors do not get the tech story.”
Happy Belly falls between both categories, and Adebisi has to construct a hybrid explanation of her valuation every time she enters a room.
She is not the only one in this position. The problem, she argues, points to something the ecosystem has not fully worked out: how to evaluate and fund businesses that are genuinely hybrid, businesses that are neither pure software nor pure brick-and-mortar, but the increasingly common thing in between.
Consumer tech in emerging markets looks different from consumer tech in San Francisco. The metrics, the timelines, the infrastructure costs, the risk profile, all of it is different. But Adebisi thinks that the frameworks investors use have not caught up.
“You are just the chef.”
There is a version of this misunderstanding that is more personal.
Adebisi has sat in rooms and been told, in one form or another, that operations is not the real work of a tech company. That the engineers and product managers are the ones building something. That the people running the kitchen, managing the vendors, and designing the systems that keep food moving across a city are, at best, support functions.
“Someone said to me, ‘You are just the chef,’” she recalls. “And it was my operational insight that was helping us optimise every section of the business, down to what technology should be built and what features we needed to improve operations.”
Her argument is direct: in consumer tech, especially food, the money is in the operations. It is in inventory management, waste reduction, vendor relationships, and margin control. It is important to know that the type of rice you use for a menu item affects your volume and profitability. It is in having a system that tells you in real time how many orders have gone out today, so that you are not waiting for someone else to tell you.
“Does your system account for when a vendor does not deliver fresh bread, and you have to send it back?” she asks. “Does it account for when all the stock you produced has perished in the freezer? Most hospitality tools in Nigeria are front-facing. They are for table, order, and customer experience management. Nobody is building for the back of house, and that is where the business actually lives.”
Kina, Happy Belly’s kitchen management software, is her answer to this gap. Adebisi and her cofounders built it for themselves because nothing on the market worked. Now it is becoming a product in its own right, handling everything from the front of house operations to inventory, sourcing, and vendor management.
The bootstrapped conviction
Happy Belly is bootstrapped.
“My partner and I are as gritty as it comes,” she says. “If I have to go to Mile 12 myself to do procurement, that is exactly what I am going to do. If I have to scour all of Alaba until I find equipment that reduces prep time from forty minutes to ten, that is exactly what I am going to do.”
Adebisi thinks she would have gotten to where she is faster if she had started smaller.
“We did it simultaneously,” she says, “building the product and setting up back-of-house systems at the same time. We did it. But it was backbreaking.”
The company is now in its third year, the point at which she says food businesses usually start to breathe. Margins are holding at a minimum of forty percent. The split into on-demand and catering has reduced operational pressure. Kina is live and being iterated on. There are plans for franchise micro-kitchens in container units across Lagos, and a West Africa expansion that focuses on cities with similar food cultures to Nigeria: Accra, Abidjan, and Kigali.
Adebisi also leads business development and West Africa expansion for The Body Shop, a vegan beauty company, simultaneously.
“Operations is operations,” she says. “The frameworks transfer. What changes is the implementation. Beauty and food are two things I take really seriously, and I’m glad I have the opportunity to work on both at the same time.”
The thing the ecosystem still has to work out
Adebisi is not bitter about the funding gap between Software as a Service (SaaS) companies and companies like Happy Belly that incorporate a hybrid model. She understands why it exists, and she has built a business that does not depend on it being resolved quickly.
But she thinks it matters more than the ecosystem has admitted.
“The industry knows affordability is a major concern,” she says. “Everyone building decks talks about total addressable market, but it is a lot tighter than anyone wants to admit. People glamorise the code-writing aspect, the apps, the UI. But with consumer tech, people do not care how pretty the app is. They care if the food arrives on time and tastes like something their mother made.”
What Adebisi wants to build, at its core, is a bet that the future of food in Lagos looks like distributed, affordable, quality-consistent, tech-backed local food, available in a container on the corner of your bus stop, not just on an app opened by people with data and disposable income.
She thinks it is a bigger, messier, more operational vision than most food tech pitches. It does not fit on a slide about SaaS multiples.
