🍞 Nigeria's National Dish

Hello, this is Demilade writing from Ibadan. Apologies for sending this out late.

I edited most of today’s deep dive on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. The journey was a little under two hours. I still remember the days when that trip was much more unpredictable; it could be an hour and a half or four hours, depending on potholes, broken-down trucks and general “Nigerianess”. This is the first time in years I’m travelling to Ibadan by road; I typically take the train (a 4-hour journey). It’s easy to take for granted the impact of multiple, somewhat reliable means of transport between the two largest cities in the South West of Nigeria. It means commuting becomes more realistic, and industry can move inland from the overpopulated coast, and visits to my parents’ childhood homes become easier. To understand your present, you need context of the past, and I remember when this trip wasn’t that easy. Say what you want about the speed of Nigeria’s transportation infrastructure buildout, but for me, this is a clear sign of progress.

I’m in Ibadan to celebrate my grandad’s 100th birthday. A legendary age, for a legendary man. As soon as I got here, I went to his incredible archive of the history of Nigeria, from politics to law, to topography, tradition and even ancient medicine. Amidst the celebrations, I intend to get his perspective on the state of the country and the world. This is a man after all who saw colonial rule, world war 2, independence, several coups, and military rule, amongst other things. I’m curious if he thinks we are progressing or regressing and if there are lessons from the past we should especially take into consideration now.

To understand the present, you need context of the past. Today’s edition is about a company from a relatively poor country that invested in Nigeria long before it was commercially sensible to do so, and its patient approach to building here has paid off incredibly.

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When you think about Nigeria's national dish, jollof rice or some dish with swallow and soup may come to mind. But if you go around the country, you’d quickly realise it’s not even an African dish at all. It is in student kitchens and roadside stalls, in Sunday breakfasts and late-night study sessions. For a country of more than 200 million people, few products are so completely woven into daily life like Indomie instant noodles. 

Most Nigerians don’t know that Indomie isn’t a Nigerian brand. It is Indonesian, sold in Nigeria by a company headquartered in Singapore and founded by a family of Indian origin. One of the most Nigerian things you can eat is, on paper, entirely foreign. And the company behind it, Tolaram, is a lesson in how to build a conglomerate in an economy with a large and rapidly urbanising population. 

Tolaram was founded in 1948 as a textile shop in Malang, Indonesia, by Khanchand Vaswani, who had moved from the subcontinent and named the business after his father. By the 1970s the family had built it into an international textile and consumer goods trading company, and in 1975 they relocated the headquarters to Singapore to sit closer to regional trade. 

A few years later, in 1977, Vaswani travelled to West Africa where he found a small consumer market that wasn’t particularly attractive on paper. Nigeria had around 67 million people and a per capita income of roughly $536. At the time, this per capita income was higher than Indonesia, and Tolaram decided to expand their trade to the country. 

Then in the early 1980s Nigeria hit a severe foreign exchange crunch. For a trading company whose whole model depended on moving goods across borders, this currency crisis was existential. In the words of Sajen Aswani, now the group's chief executive, the crisis forced them to reconsider the entire model, because capital was, in effect, trapped inside Nigeria.

Two lessons followed. The first was financial: Tolaram found that, for its Nigerian business, it was less risky to raise capital in Nigeria than to rely on foreign lenders wary of a currency default, so it began to fund itself locally. The second was operational: rather than import finished goods it could no longer easily pay for, it started to manufacture inside Nigeria. 

The company also uncovered an important consumer insight. In fast-growing cities like Lagos, more women were joining the workforce, commutes were lengthening and working households had less time to cook meals that traditionally took hours. A pack of instant noodles, with some protein and vegetables added, could be a quick and complete meal for a family under time pressure. As the textile business faded towards the end of the decade, the family fell back on a simple thesis: food, shelter and clothing would always be in demand in a country that size. So they went in search of a food business. 

Instant noodles were invented in post-war Japan, launched by Momofuku Ando of Nissin in 1958 as a cheap, convenient meal for a country still recovering from the Second World War. The Indomie brand was created by the Salim Group in 1972, its name a simple join of "Indo" for Indonesia and "mie" for noodles. 

Tolaram began importing Indomie into Nigeria in 1988. The early reception was not warm. Nigerians ate rice, not noodles; some consumers even thought they were being asked to eat worms. Tolaram had the hard task of building a food category from nothing, and it took years of sampling and patient consumer education.

The decisive move was to make the product locally rather than ship it in. In 1995, Tolaram formed a joint venture with Indonesia's Salim Group. The Indomie brand is owned by Indofood (Salim Group), but the distribution and factories, including the first instant noodle plant in Nigeria, at Ota, Ogun State, in 1996, then the largest of its kind in Africa, were built and are run by Tolaram. Manufacturing locally solved the currency problem the 1980s had exposed, and it let the company control cost in a market where consumers are price sensitive. The business only turned profitable around 2002, well over a decade after the first imports (Core Advisory). Tolaram was patient about growth in a way few investors tolerate.

At its peak, two decades ago, Indomie was a monopoly in the instant noodle market. Its success inspired new entrants, and today, it is 60% of Nigeria's noodle market. Volumes crossed one billion packs a year as far back as 2010, and Indomie has long been the reference brand against which every rival is measured.

Dufil Prima Plc, the publicly listed joint venture between Tolaram and Salim Group, reported revenue of ₦501 billion in 2023, then ₦810 billion in 2024, a rise of nearly 62%, with noodles alone accounting for more than 74% of the total. By the standards of Nigerian consumer goods, this is a giant.

Culturally, Indomie has arrived in a way brands rarely manage. Its packets have been kept cheap enough to be an everyday staple, and the brand has crossed from the shelf into the language. Nobody set out to market a national dish, but its market positioning led it to become one.  

Following the success of Indomie, Tolaram took the same playbook: local manufacturing plus deep distribution plus a global partner who owned the brand, and ran it again and again. In 2014, it partnered with Denmark's Arla, the owner of Dano milk, to produce and package the powdered milk brand locally, doubling its volume within the first two years of the partnership. Ventures with global brands including Kellogg's, Colgate-Palmolive and Kimberly-Clark followed the same pattern.

In 2024, it entered the beer sector, buying Diageo's majority stake in Guinness Nigeria for about NGN103.7 billion ($70 million), following disappointing results from the most recent devaluation of the naira. 

It also invested in hard assets. Tolaram spearheaded the Lekki Deep Sea Port and the 850-hectare Lagos Free Zone, an industrial area 65 kilometres from the city, built specifically to relieve the constraints that throttle everyone trying to manufacture in Nigeria. Tolaram holds a stake of around 22.5% in the port. Having spent decades learning that infrastructure was the real bottleneck, the company went and built a piece of the solution.

For a conglomerate that spans more than 15 countries and headquartered in Singapore, Nigeria remains a significant part of the country’s business. It is repeatedly described as the group's deepest foothold and its largest market. Tolaram has put around $500 million into two dozen manufacturing facilities in Nigeria alone. Today, instant noodles account for roughly a quarter of the group's gross revenue, on a base of about $1.2 billion dollars.

The story of Tolaram is one of continuous investment over 50 years into a country where it hasn’t always been easy to underwrite. They created a market that did not exist, they moved to manufacturing through a currency crisis that sent others home, and then they bought the infrastructure around themselves so the next decade would be easier than the last.

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