By Sizakele Nduli
When Vumile Magasela’s friends and family complimented her on her cooking skills, it sparked an interest in starting a cooking business. But it was not until she realised that no one was selling food at the taxi rank in Montclair in Durban, that the self-taught cook from Umlazi set up her own table under a tree and began selling rice, phuthu, curries and side dishes in January 2022.
“Because I advertised on social media a lot, and social media supported me, especially Twitter and Facebook, I started getting calls from people who wanted me to deliver to office parks and I wasn’t delivering, but I got an order for 10 people at an office park in uMhlanga and I went to deliver to them,” Magasela said. The following Friday, they went to her because they loved the food.
Nearly three months later, she was denied a permit to continue operating at the taxi rank. However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise as Magasela, 29, took her time to rebrand Vumile Cooks, which is now a catering company that specialises in lunch packs for workers. Magasela told Vutivi News that she was motivated by the countless calls she received from customers to start selling food again.
She decided to eliminate the physical distance and test if the business could survive. “I started with just delivering to that one office park, those 10 plates. And then the following Friday I decided to print pamphlets and went to uMhlanga and distributed my pamphlets physically to office parks that I see around the area, and the people started buying and ordering,” she explained.
Today, Magasela also has her own spice brand, SpiceyMuch, which offers a selection of 10 unique spices between R25 and R45. She delivers via Paxi, Postnet, and Aramex. “When social media people would comment things like, ‘I wish I could taste your food, but you’re too far’, I thought, how can I bring my food to everyone? and the one thing that I could distribute to as many people as I possibly could wasn’t my food, but my taste,” she said.
According to Magasela, one of the obstacles that she has encountered is a lack of knowledge on how to run a business, and not being able to employ workers on a fixed-term or permanent basis. “At this point, my business can’t afford it, but I also run cooking classes, so whenever I have big gigs for catering, I use the people that attend my classes to give them jobs for the day,” she said. It was crucial that people looking to enter the food business conduct research, including asking consumers about their food preferences and spending habits, and comparing prices with their competitors, Magasela said.
