Posted by In 2020 I wrote about TradeDepot, a Lagos startup that wanted to become the preferred supply chain partner for Africa’s micro-retailers. Six years on, it is still in business, which is more than can be said for many of its peers. But it is no longer the company I described. The platform that set out to connect FMCG brands with neighbourhood shops now makes its own sardines and sells its own wine.
How it got there says a lot about B2B distribution in Africa.
Where it started
TradeDepot was founded in 2016 to connect consumer goods companies with informal retailers in Nigeria. By mid-2020 it was serving more than 40,000 micro-retailers, working with multinational and local suppliers such as Nestlé, Unilever, Danone, Arla and Promasidor. The pitch was simple: more affordable goods and more regular supply for a fragmented retail base, better margins for the shopkeeper, and less working capital tied up in stock.
That June it raised US$10 million in a pre-Series B round, co-led by Partech, the IFC, the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative and MSA Capital. It was operating in Lagos and Abuja, with plans for other Nigerian cities and Ghana.
The technology was sensible rather than flashy. Each retailer saw only the products and prices available in their own area. Field staff could work offline, because the network in Nigeria drops out all the time. Orders were pooled and sent to the nearest distributor, and a central scheduling system matched each order to a driver’s available load and planned the routes. The aim was fuller trucks and fewer wasted trips.
The big raise
Eighteen months later the money got much bigger. In December 2021 TradeDepot raised US$110 million in a Series B of equity and debt, with the debt led by Arcadia Funds. The plan was to extend buy-now-pay-later credit to as many as 5 million retailers. By then it had around 60,000 retailers on the platform and was active in twelve cities: ten in Nigeria, plus Accra and Johannesburg. Most of its stores were still in Nigeria.
This was the peak of the B2B e-commerce boom. Investors were betting that whoever digitised the informal shop would own the last mile of African retail, and that credit would be where the real money was made.
The shakeout
It did not work out that way for most of the sector. When the funding dried up in 2022 and 2023, B2B platforms across the continent cut staff, closed markets or shut down altogether. Alerzo and Wasoko made deep cuts. Sabi moved away from retail distribution towards commodity trading. The model of moving other people’s goods on thin margins, while lending to shopkeepers, burned cash faster than it built a business.
TradeDepot survived, but it chose a different way out.
From distributor to brand owner
In February 2025 TradeDepot launched Mangrove, its own food brand, starting with products like sardines priced well below the market leader. “We used to simply distribute for brands,” CEO Onyekachi Izukanne said at the launch. Later that year it added Amabile, a sweet wine made with an Italian winery for the Nigerian market, a category it says is worth around $420 million a year. Izukanne now describes TradeDepot as a data company: it sees what retailers order, spots the gaps, and fills them with its own products.
The company also reworked its logistics around manufacturing and exclusive distribution deals with brands. And it now sits inside a wider group. Izukanne also runs Africa Trade Engine, which works with TRT Manufacturing to set up production and packaging close to where people buy, then plugs those products, and smaller brands that pay for performance, into TradeDepot’s distribution network.
The most telling line from the Mangrove launch was this: “Our biggest competitor is the wholesaler in the market.”
Why the move makes sense, and where it could go wrong
The logic is easy to follow. Distribution margins in FMCG are thin, and a platform that only moves other people’s brands has little to bargain with. Owning the brand captures the margin that used to go to the manufacturer. TradeDepot also knows something most manufacturers do not: what tens of thousands of small shops actually order, week by week, and at what price. That is a real advantage when launching a product.
The risk is just as clear. A distributor that competes with the brands it carries puts those relationships under strain. Nestlé or Unilever may think twice about relying on a partner that is pushing a cheaper sardine next to theirs. And manufacturing brings fixed costs, quality control and import exposure that a platform never had to carry.
What it says about B2B in Africa
TradeDepot’s story fits a pattern. The platforms that set out to replace the wholesaler mostly underestimated what the wholesaler does. The wholesaler extends credit, knows the customer, holds stock close to the shop and works on margins no venture-backed company can match. Technology made ordering easier, but it did not change the economics of moving a carton of noodles across Lagos.
The survivors have stopped trying to be pure platforms. Some have moved into finance, some into commodities, and TradeDepot into making the goods itself. In each case they have gone looking for margin that distribution alone could not provide.
First published in 2020. Updated November 2026.Nigeria, according to Nielsen.
Video: TradeDepot Nigeria
