Cape Town's ‘surprise’ chocolate & spinach cookie goes global

A chocolate and spinach cookie may not be everybody’s idea of a teatime snack. However, it was just the ticket for Cape Town’s Khayelitsha Cookies, which has landed a contract to supply British Airways thanks largely to this unique recipe.    

“That was the winner – the deal clincher,” company managing director Adri Williams says of the unusual cookie presented to potential clients at a British trade show last month. “That is what blew people’s imaginations -- they looked at the cookie and said, there is no ways this cookie contains real spinach.”

It does, and the cookie with its locally grown spinach content will now feature on British Airways flights as an inflight snack.  

Williams says the cookie is already doing well locally in Shoprite stores under the ‘Ouma Goodness’ range. “It’s a cookie that is not available anywhere else in the world. Have you ever heard of a chocolate and spinach cookie?”

The opportunity to showcase the unusual cookie came via the British Trade Partnerships Programme, which assists small and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries. Williams used her background in sales and marketing to maximise this opportunity, ensuring she pitched suitable products. “For instance, you cannot export anything that has egg in it. So we tweaked our recipes to ensure they were egg free.”

Williams believes the company’s grassroots profile has also contributed to their success and plentiful support from multiple corporates. The Company has humble beginnings, starting in the Mfuleni training centre with just two bakers. It battled with profitability, and at one stage was saddled with over R2-million debt. Under Williams’ management – she bought the company ten years ago for R1 – it has expanded and now employs 93 women, mostly from Khayelitsha. The company is now renting a 1600 square metre facility in Parow and has an employment waiting list of 2000 women.

The company prides itself on producing only hand-baked cookies, which support significantly more jobs than machine operations. Williams believes the imperative to employ as many people as possible is central to the company ethos and marketing success. “If I go from employing my women to machine baking, we would drop down to just 12 staff. But we measure our success based on job creation,” she says, adding that each staff member is able to support an entire family.

Williams says her cookie success – she previously worked for a corporate – was born out of a social conscience and determination to address widespread poverty. Through volunteer work at a local hospital she became acutely aware of the level of child malnutrition, and the need for a whole-society response to structural poverty. “It’s not out there that people are dying of malnutrition, it is on our back door.”

Khayelitsha Cookies is not the only Cape Town company creating jobs in the food sector.  

Cape Cookies, founded in 1992, today employs more than three hundred and fifty people and has an international market footprint. “Our products are sold in all five major retail chains in South Africa as well as in 23 other countries throughout the world including China, New Zealand, Philippines, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Saudi Arabia etc,” the company says on its website.

Williams believes South African food products offer a ‘taste benefit’ on account of the country’s rich cultural diversity: “It is because we are used to taste in South Africa, with all our different food flavours and spices, because of our heritage. We have such a wide variety of tastes.”