Chow Central, virtual restaurant chains in African cities

Hi YC 👋🏾, we’re Tosin, Christopher, and Adeyemi operating from Lagos, Nigeria.

Chow Central is building restaurant chains for Millennials and Gen Z living in African cities who want high-quality and healthy meals. Think of us as Chipotle for African meals.

Chow Central started as a fun experiment shortly after we graduated from University.  We created a virtual restaurant page on Twitter to sell affordable meals and also help underutilized restaurants get sales during the Covid lockdown.

We relaunched 18 months ago, currently active in just one region and we are doing over $80,000 in monthly revenue.

We have modified our approach, we operate a central kitchen to improve quality and maintain consistency. We then partner with highly-vetted underutilized commercial kitchens to serve as our fulfillment centers.

Our customers love our delicious recipes and our faster & cheaper deliveries. Our approach of leveraging underutilized kitchens allows us to initially launch in a location with minimal capital investment.

We operate two restaurant brands:

Firstly, 500chow is a high-quality restaurant that serves delicious local African delicacies. Our second restaurant is a healthy grill, shawarma, and barbecue restaurant.

Millennials and Gen Z in African cities who want to order meals online are still underserved. There are over 50 million of them, if we can serve 5 million of them once every month with an average spend of $8, this represents a $5B market opportunity. 

Chris and Yemi previously built industry-leading products at Moniepoint. Tosin previously worked at Vendease (W21) a restaurant supply-chain company.

How can you help?

• Refer us to your friends visiting or living in Lagos, Nigeria

• Check out our newly released mobile application and give feedback on the user experience (Pro tip, set your location to Lekki Phase 1)

  Want to talk about food? Shoot us an email founders@500chow.com