On the 11th of February, 2023, Itoro Akrasi, known in her social media circle as Itee Akrasi, made an important announcement on her Facebook page: She had just moved her food vending business to her own restaurant at the Officer’s Mess at NNS Beecroft, a Nigerian Navy settlement in Apapa. The collective response to this announcement — over 5700 reactions and 2,500k comments — highlighted the significance of this feat to Itee and her friends; five years on, her leap of faith is paying off.
In 2018, she started selling food out of the kitchen of her two-bedroom apartment in Surulere. Her primary motivation was based on her dissatisfaction with the quality of catfish pepper soup she ate in restaurants around her. “When I came to Lagos for my NYSC,” Akrasi says, “I tried several different restaurants and resigned to the fact that none of these places could prepare pepper soup the proper way — especially the catfish pepper soup.”
She related this frustration to her friends and social media audience and took recommendations from them on where she could find catfish pepper soup that would meet her expectations. But once all the places she tried out fell below her expectations, she had to take matters into her hands. “After trying out catfish pepper soup in 5 different spots, I decided to start selling only catfish pepper soup online,” she tells me. “I branded it ‘Mobile Catfish Pepper Soup by Teerasi’.”
Although she considers herself a great cook, her relationship with cooking hasn’t been very cordial. In fact, she doesn’t consider cooking something she enjoys doing for free. She says, “I love eating out and trying out other people’s food. The funny part is, now I love to see people eat and enjoy my meals, but back in school, you’d have to pay me or promise me something huge to get me to enter the kitchen.” She remembers cooking as a skill she learned reluctantly as a seven-year-old growing up in Uyo.
Akrasi recalls her nanny forcing her into the kitchen while she cooked, and having to watch as dinner was made for the family. She doesn’t relate to this memory with much fondness. “My nanny, Aunty Sabbath, taught me how to cook. I was seven when she started being our nanny and then she would drag me to the kitchen to watch her cook even in front of my parents. I hated it so much. At some point, I even disliked my parents for letting her drag me into the kitchen because that was not how I saw it in movies.”
On the day she announced the opening of her catfish pepper soup brand, she got eight orders, all from Facebook. Over the following weeks, she expanded from just catfish pepper soup to selling soups like afang, seafood okra, and even varieties of rice. She believes that being from Akwa Ibom state may have created an impression that she could perform wonders with afang and seafood okra, and so people demanded these soups more than anything else.
Interestingly, even though she has some mastery over popular Akwa Ibom cuisines now, her first attempt at cooking was understandably unremarkable. She tells me she made her first meal — editan soup — when she was nine years old. She forgot to wash the leaves properly with hot water and salt to reduce the bitter taste and it turned out to be a disaster. “I don’t think the vinegar they gave to Jesus before crucifixion was as bitter as that soup when I was done,” she says. “No one ate it except my dad, who believed that bitter leaves are medicinal and can give him long life.”
And so, before coming to Lagos, she did not envision she could ever make a career out of cooking. Growing up, she dreamt of being a lawyer but went to Ghana to study Human Resources Management. “At some point in my life, I even looked down on food sellers,” she admits.
After she returned to Lagos, Nigeria for her youth service, she started a thriving business as a skincare therapist and even opened a beauty salon in 2017. However, as her food vending business grew, she started to pay more attention to cooking which eventually paid off. But, the business has not been without its challenges. She narrates two incidents that stood out for her: Once, a delivery that left her house in the morning got to the receiver in the night and the entire food went bad. She had to send another food tray with a profuse apology. Another time, she cooked for an event, and she was told to deliver before 8 a.m. which she did. But being was egusi soup and rice, she’d expected the hosts to share the food that morning, but instead, they left the food still and went to church. When they got back by 1 p.m., the soups had all gone bad. She wasn’t obligated to replace the food because she had done her part but she was heartbroken when the client called to cry. She had to redo the order. Notwithstanding these challenges, she leaned on the unwavering support of her customers.
Opening a restaurant was not part of Itee’s new year plan. One afternoon in February, she got a call from a senior naval officer at the NNS Beecroft, Apapa, who asked her if she was interested in taking over a vacant space at the officer’s mess for the cost of an affordable yearly rent. Although she was initially reluctant about taking a leap that high, she eventually accepted the proposition and has since started selling from her new space. This move grew her business exponentially, opening her to a much larger client base than she was used to. “I used to serve 8 to 15 people from my kitchen,” she says, “but now I sell up to 100 plates of food on a good day.”
For Itee Akrasi, transitioning from a small-scale food business to a much larger scale hasn’t been particularly easy. She’s struggled to get used to the scale of work required to cater to her new customers and almost suffered a breakdown within a few days after she started, but she’s learned to get used to the pace of work and now has a team of five staff members who help her out.
In the long run, she plans to open more restaurants in Lagos, and some others in Abuja and Uyo, the capital city of her home state. She also hopes to start a cooking academy someday.
If you would like to discover the freshest restaurant food supplies and swiftest delivery in Nigeria and Ghana, manage your payments and business operations, and set up your restaurant for success all in one dashboard, click the button below.
