Mira Mehta, a Finnish-Indian American, didn’t move to Nigeria with a startup idea. She moved because she was done. At the time, she was working in finance just outside New York. The salary was good. The path ahead was certain, almost promised. But everything else felt wrong. “I hated everything about my job except the salary,” she told Business Insider Africa.
For Mehta, staying meant committing to a life she didn’t believe in, so she chose uncertainty instead. She quit. She then applied to a healthcare nonprofit. During the interview, she was asked a simple question about whether there was anywhere she wouldn’t go. She didn’t hesitate. “No. I’ll go anywhere,” she said. That answer took her to Nigeria with the Clinton Foundation, into a life she had not planned, but one that would come to birth Tomato Jos, in 2014
She arrived in Abuja expecting to experience Nigeria. But it didn’t take long to realise that Abuja didn’t show a full reality. It was a version of it. “Abuja is a bubble,” her boss told her. “You need to see the real Nigeria.”
So she left the capital and travelled north, from Jos to Kano and beyond, visiting health centres and hospitals. The work was about improving access, ensuring drugs were available, and ensuring systems functioned. But as she moved through these communities, she began to see something else. The problem ran deeper than healthcare. People lacked the means to survive.
People weren’t only struggling to pay for treatment, but they couldn’t even afford to get to the hospital. At first, she had assumed the answer was better healthcare, more access, stronger systems, and improved delivery. But over time, she began to see the limits of that thinking. External solutions, no matter how well-intentioned, often overlook the realities on the ground.
“I realised I don’t actually know what people need. But if they had money, they could decide for themselves,” she said. It was a shift in perspective, from intervention to empowerment.
The Tomato Paradox
As she went about her daily work, she began to notice the tomatoes. On long drives through the north, especially toward Kano, they appeared everywhere, sprawled across the ground, stretching for miles. “It looked like a red carpet,” Mira Mehta, founder and CEO of Tomato Jos, said.
Farmers had grown more than they could sell, and without the means to store or process the harvest, they were forced to leave it out in the sun, hoping to salvage value. Most of them still made losses.
In Nigeria, an estimated 50% of fresh tomatoes produced each year are lost to post-harvest challenges, driven by weak supply chains, inadequate storage infrastructure, and poor transportation systems.
What she saw on the roads stood in sharp contrast to what she knew about consumption. Tomato paste is a staple in Nigerian households, used daily across meals. Demand was constant. Supply, as she had seen, was overflowing. Yet they existed separately.
Nigeria produces roughly 65% of the tomatoes grown in West Africa, making it one of the largest producers in the region, yet it is also one of the largest importers of tomato paste in the world.
“I kept thinking, I’ve seen all these tomatoes on the road. Why is the paste coming from China?” she said.
The contradiction was not new. As early as the 1980s, Nigeria had built state-owned tomato processing facilities to encourage local production. More recently, in 2016, Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, established a $20 million tomato processing factory in northern Nigeria, designed to reduce the country’s reliance on imports, create jobs, and support local agriculture.
Yet the outcome has remained the same. The plant is currently weighed down by high operating costs and fierce competition from substandard imported products. Across the country, many of the facilities built over time have shut down, unable to run efficiently due to an inability to source consistent raw materials.
But recognising a problem is one thing. Solving it is another. The deeper Mehta looked, the more complex it became. Before making any big moves, she went in search of answers.
She travelled to California, Spain, and Italy, places where tomato processing was already industrialised, to understand how the system worked. And everywhere she went, she heard the same thing: don’t build a factory until you can guarantee supply. Because if you cannot consistently supply tomatoes at the required quality and volume, even the best factory cannot survive.
So instead of rushing into manufacturing, she chose to start where the real problem lay, farming. Average yields in Nigeria hovered around 5 tons per hectare, far below global benchmarks. Low productivity meant low returns, and low returns meant farmers couldn’t sustain profitability. So she began with experimentation. The aim was to find the minimum viable approach, which is the smallest amount of land and capital needed to demonstrate that higher yields are possible.
Those early years were slow. But over time, the experiments began to show results. It took six years for the model to reach a level of reliability sufficient to support scaling.
Financing an Idea No One Saw Yet
Funding those early years was another challenge entirely. No large investors were waiting to back an agricultural experiment in northern Nigeria. The capital came together gradually, piece by piece. “Initially, we started with a small amount of prize money from Harvard after placing second in a Social Enterprise competition; that came with a $25,000 cash prize,” Mehta said.
It was a starting point. Then came a $50,000 Kickstarter campaign—early funding. After that, she raised small amounts of equity from friends, family, and the networks she had built through business school and her time in the nonprofit sector.
“For the first four years, we survived on roughly $300,000 to $400,000. It was a very lean operation,” she said. “ I wasn’t taking a salary, and we invested what we had into a small greenhouse for seedlings and a drip irrigation system for our three hectares.”
Every dollar had to stretch. There was no room for waste, only a quiet focus on proving that the model could work. By 2016, the business was still early, but it had something more important than scale—evidence. The first institutional investor came in 2017, but by then, the foundation had already been laid.
By 2020, the company had gained enough traction to attract larger institutional backing. Tomato Jos closed a €3.9 million Series A funding round for an irrigation and processing plant, marking a major milestone in its growth journey and validating years of experimentation and persistence.
The plant, located in Kaduna State, represents a step toward solving the very problem that had inspired the business in the first place, bridging the gap between production and processing.
Momentum continued to build. In 2024, Tomato Jos secured $12.2 million in funding, the largest raise by any female-led startup in Africa that year.
As the business evolved, it became clear that solving the tomato problem required more than just improving yields. It required rethinking the entire supply chain. Tomatoes are highly perishable. Once harvested, they need to be processed quickly, often within 24 hours.
Relying on open market sourcing introduces too much uncertainty. Prices fluctuate. Supply is inconsistent. Quality varies. For a processing business, that level of unpredictability is unsustainable. So Tomato Jos built a different model.
Instead of relying on the open market, the company built a more controlled system. Tomatoes are grown within a structured network, on land linked to the business, using inputs and support provided by the company. Irrigation is managed. Equipment is supplied. Technical guidance is constant. Farmers focus on growing, while the company ensures the conditions are right for yield. At harvest, the tomatoes move quickly, straight into processing. It is a system designed for alignment, reducing risk on both sides.
The results have been striking. From a national average of 5 tons per hectare, farmers within the Tomato Joss system now reach around 60 tons, a twelvefold increase. That shift translates directly into income. Farmers who once struggled to break even are now earning real profits.
Some make up to ₦2 million from just a quarter hectare, even after repaying input loans. Over time, more than 10,000 farmers have passed through the system, with about 1,000 active at any given moment. Around 60% are women, a deliberate choice, grounded in the belief that income in the hands of women extends further into the household.
More Than Just Farming
The impact goes beyond income. Farmers reinvest their earnings—starting poultry businesses, buying motorcycles or cars for transport, or acquiring equipment like threshing machines.
On the consumer side, the challenge was different. Nigerian markets have long favoured imported goods, often seen as higher quality. For a local brand, changing that perception required more than messaging; it required experience.
Tomato Jos focused on product quality and direct engagement. “When people taste it, they can taste the tomato,” Mehta said. Unlike many alternatives that rely on fillers, the product emphasises real tomato content. To prove this, the company invested in sampling, putting the product directly in consumers’ hands. Over time, that experience began to shift perception.
Despite the progress, the business still operates in a challenging environment. “Cash, cash, cash,” she said, describing the biggest constraint. Manufacturing requires upfront investment—products are made before they are sold. “If we’re producing a million units now, it’s because we expect to sell them later, but the cash doesn’t come in at the same time.” That gap makes working capital critical as every decision must align with cash flow.
Beyond this, the agricultural environment remains complex. Input costs are rising. Fertiliser prices, tied to global oil markets, have increased. Diesel costs fluctuate, affecting transport and irrigation. Climate patterns are less predictable, with shifting rainfall and rising temperatures. Even global events can disrupt local supply chains. Together, these factors continue to shape the realities of building an agricultural business in Nigeria.
Today, Tomato Jos distributes across major Nigerian cities, including Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Benin. The focus remains on strengthening local operations, improving supply chains, expanding distribution, and building consumer trust. Export opportunities exist, but for now, the priority is a resilient domestic system, according to Mehta.
“I always say Nigeria chose me,” Mehta said. But what followed was intentional, a response to what she saw, and a reminder that sometimes the biggest opportunities lie not in creating something new, but in fixing what already exists.
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