🍞 The Milk Wars

Hello, this is Demilade.

For four decades, branded milk in Nigeria meant one thing: a tin of Peak. Then, in the worst year the naira had ever seen, a company nobody had heard of arrived with a ₦5 sachet and a cow family on the label.

Today’s newsletter is the story of the two brands that split Nigeria's breakfast table. And of who is really winning now. It’s also a story of two main ways of doing business in emerging markets. You either build a premium brand that bets on a rapidly growing middle class, less capital-intensive but more contingent on economic growth and stability. Or you go mass market, which is more capital-intensive and depends entirely on building a deep distribution network.

Businesses all over Nigeria and Africa are consistently making these decisions, sometimes deciding to run both Playbooks at the same time.

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The NGX All-Share Index fell 0.74 per cent as profit-taking in heavyweight stocks including Dangote Cement, MTN Nigeria and tier-one banks drove selling through most of the week.

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The naira weakened 0.87 per cent against the dollar as foreign exchange turnover on the official market remained subdued through the first full week of November.

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Brent crude fell 12.96 per cent to $90.91 a barrel as hopes of diplomatic breakthroughs in US-Iran tensions and Ukraine peace talks accelerated selling.

In 1979, in Kinshasa, a company called Promasidor started selling milk powder in sachets so small that a single one made a cup. The country was still called Zaire at the time, Mobutu was still in charge, and almost nobody had a refrigerator.

The man behind it, Robert Rose, an Englishman who left Britain for Rhodesia in 1957 and spent the next two decades running food businesses across the continent. He ran was the African arm of J. Lyons, the London tea-and-cake group, which had operated since 1950 and merged with Brooke Bond there in 1963. Lyons was later swallowed by Allied Breweries, forming Allied Lyons Africa, which Rose became chairman of. Before he started selling milk, Rose spent twenty years selling tea, coffee and ice cream in southern and central Africa.

That experience gave him two observations. The first was that milk, the one nutritious product rich countries take for granted, was barely available to most Africans, which was a bigger opportunity than the products he was selling. The second was more technical, Milk powder manufacturing was improving fast, and if you removed the animal fat from the milk and replaced it with vegetable fat, the powder lasted much longer on the shelf. Vegetable fat does not go rancid in the heat the way butterfat does. It is also cheaper.

Put the two together and you get a product that can sit in a kiosk in 35-degree heat for months, costs a fraction of liquid milk, and can be sold one portion at a time to someone who will never buy a tin. Promasidor called it Cowbell.

Promasidor was founded in 1979 and sold Cowbell in central and southern African countries like Zambia and Zaire from a base in Kenya. About a decade later, the sachet milk in Lagos, Nigeria. With a lot of competition.

By the time Rose died in 2009, the company he built was in more than 30 African countries and his son Mark was running it. But Nigeria was clearly the market that had defined the brand.

Two things make Cowbell special, and neither is the milk.

The first is the fat. "Full cream" milk powder is whole milk with the water taken out. Cowbell is a "Filled" milk powder, which is skimmed milk (i.e with the butterfat removed) and vegetable fat blended back in, usually palm or coconut oil. Replacing butterfat with vegetable fat does two jobs. Firstly, the process makes production much cheaper, as butterfat is the expensive part of the cow. Secondly, filled powder is also stable in warm climates, which is essential on a continent with very limited cold chain storage. Nigeria's milk shelves today hold more filled milk than full cream.

The taste is thinner, but the protein and calcium are still there, and the price is lower.

The second is the pack. A sachet actually makes milk more expensive per gram. However, it cuts the price of entry. A 400g tin asks a family to commit a week's milk money in one go. A sachet asks for the price of one serving. It turns a monthly purchase into a daily one, which allows more customers access to the product. There's also another benefit: a daily purchase means the customer comes back to the kiosk every morning, which means the kiosk must stock it, which means the brand must be everywhere.

This is why the model works in some places and fails in others. Promasidor's own managing director in Kenya said it plainly: "milk powder doesn't work in Kenya" because the country has a large fresh dairy industry. Sachet powder wins where there is no cow nearby. Nigeria, which imports about 60% of the milk it drinks, was the perfect market.

In Nigeria, Cowbell wasn't walking into an unserved market; there was already an incumbent. Peak Milk was not a milk brand. It was a class marker.

Peak arrived in Nigeria in 1954, as imported tins of evaporated milk. The company behind it, a cooperative of Dutch dairy farmers now called Royal FrieslandCampina, did not set up a Nigerian company for almost two decades. It eventually incorporated West Africa Milk Company, WAMCO, in 1973, after the 1972 Indigenisation Decree forced foreign firms to bring in Nigerian shareholders. Production began in Lagos two years later and it became a public company in 1978.

The Dutch parent held 51% as late as 1997; the rest belonged to Nigerian institutions and individuals. WAMCO was the first company to make evaporated milk in Nigeria, and for most of its first forty years it had the branded milk market almost to itself. Its jingle was "Peak, milk at its peak". One writer later called Peak "the unlikely status symbol": if you drank it, you were soft, an ajebutter. Branded milk was a luxury for the rich, and Peak was the brand exemplar of that luxury.

In 1988 it launched a cheaper second brand, Three Crowns, as an evaporated milk, and in the same decade it began exploring dairy farming in Nigeria. But both brands came in tins, which became a problem. In the 1980s, the Naira went from ₦2 to the dollar in 1986 to ₦22 in 1993 under the Structural Adjustment Programme ( and inflation ran close to 60% a year. An imported tin of milk had become, for most households, something to buy at Christmas.

Promasidor came to Nigeria in March 1993 under the name Wonder Foods, three months before the June 12 election was annulled. It is hard to imagine a worse moment to launch an imported consumer product. The naira had lost 90% of its value in seven years. The IFC described a company with "scarce financial resources" that took a bank loan to set up a factory with second-hand machines in Isolo.

And the first thing it did was get the product wrong. Cowbell launched at a size similar to Peak's, a 400g pack of powder, and sales were poor. Nobody needed another tin from a brand they had never heard of.

As with many things in the Nigeria, the innovation came from the roadside and not the boardroom. To shift stock, the company imported larger bags of powder and sold them to wholesalers, who scooped the milk into small polythene bags and resold it by the portion. That got traction. Nigerian traders had, in effect, invented the sachet for them. Promasidor then did the obvious thing and made the sachet itself: a 39g pack at ₦5, launched in April 1993, the first powdered milk in Nigeria sold in a single-serve sachet.

Everything else followed from that price. The company painted shop fronts blue, the Cowbell colour, and put a cartoon cow family on the pack. It sent sales staff out in company uniforms to call on kiosks in residential streets and by the roadside, places Peak's distributors did not bother with. Its tagline was "Our Milk", which was both a boast and a dig: Peak was theirs, Cowbell was ours. By the end of the first year the company had become a household name.

The sachet did not just sell milk. It created a new customer. A woman frying akara could offer a sachet to a buyer. A child could buy one on the way to school. A household on ₦500 a week could join a category it had been priced out of for a decade. Peak had spent forty years telling Nigerians that milk was something to aspire to. Cowbell told them it was for everyone.

Peak's answer, when it came, was the most famous advert in Nigerian television history.

A skinny boy in Owerri is eating his breakfast. A tin of Peak slips off the table and, with one flick of the foot, he keeps it off the ground. The milk seller, delighted, delivers the line that every Nigerian over 30 can still recite: "Papilo, I know say one day, you go make us proud." The boy is Nwankwo Kanu, and the ad made his nickname more famous than his surname. A follow-up had Kanu telling his son about the heart condition that nearly ended his career, and how he was "de-tah-meened". The jingle underneath both ran: "from generation to generation, Peak has always been there."

It was an ad of an incumbent's advert. Selling reliability, continuity, family, the idea that the people who matter have always drunk Peak.

Cowbell could not afford Kanu. So it bought schools instead. In 1998 it launched a mathematics competition for secondary students in Lagos State. By 2000 it covered six states; by 2001, all 36 and Abuja. Every winner got Cowbell milk, a rucksack and a certificate, and the brand got a place in the one building every Nigerian child walks into. Fun fact: I contested and placed in these math competitions.

It became Cowbellpedia, a TV quiz show, in 2016, and it is still running. Where Peak sold the dream of becoming Kanu, Cowbell sold aspiration in another way.

The two brands were fighting on different fields, and that suited both of them initially, until Peak began selling sachets…

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Dangote Cement has abandoned its proposed secondary listing on the London Stock Exchange, citing market conditions and strategic priorities, the company disclosed on Tuesday. The cement maker, valued at ₦24.79 trillion ($18.42 billion), had first announced the plan in May, six months before pulling the plug.

Market volatility following the US midterm elections contributed to the decision, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is another blow to London's struggling bourse, which has seen more than 30 companies leave or announce departures this year, with takeover bids outstripping new listings by 27 to 1.

Watch: No timeline given for when or whether the company might revive the London listing.

📲🇿🇦 MTN's $6.2bn IHS Towers takeover awaits final nod from three regulators

MTN Group is getting closer to taking full control of IHS Towers, following regulatory approvals in Nigeria and from COMESA, with the proposed $6.2 billion acquisition on track for completion before the end of 2026. Three major regulatory decisions are still outstanding: South Africa's Competition Tribunal, ECOWAS, and CEMAC.

With the deal, MTN returns to direct ownership of thousands of towers it originally built and later sold to IHS, reversing a decade-long shift toward outsourced tower leasing. Nigeria's FCCPC has approved the transaction on the condition that MTN sells down up to 30% of the Nigerian component of the IHS business at market prices over time.

Watch: South Africa's Competition Tribunal hearing is set for 17 November 2026.

🇧🇼🇿🇦 Cartier’s owner eyes a seat in the De Beers deal
Richemont, the owner of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, has been in talks since mid-October to join the Global Diamond Consortium, the group bidding for Anglo American’s 85% of De Beers. US jeweller Signet, which owns Kay and Zales, is also in talks. Neither is certain to take part, and any Richemont stake is expected to be small. On Monday, Botswana’s President Duma Boko named the consortium his preferred bidder, saying “Botswana will become the single largest shareholder in De Beers”. He wants the country’s stake to rise from 15% to 30%. The consortium has so far agreed to 25%, according to a source close to the talks. People familiar with the deal say Anglo would get $750 million upfront and $250 million later. Anglo says it is now working towards binding agreements. Watch: whether Botswana gets its 30%, and whether Richemont signs on.

🌍 S&P urges Africa to pool projects to close its infrastructure gap
S&P Global Ratings says Africa should stop funding infrastructure one project at a time and start bundling projects into larger investment platforms. The African Development Bank puts the continent’s annual infrastructure funding shortfall at $60 billion to $100 billion. Meanwhile, aid to sub-Saharan Africa fell 26% in 2025 and is expected to drop another 12% this year. Size is the problem. Most large institutional investors won’t buy debt deals under $100 million, but the typical African deal is worth $35 million to $55 million. Many also lack an investment-grade rating. Pooling projects across sectors and countries would make deals bigger and spread the risk. S&P points to the Lobito Corridor, a 1,300km railway linking Angola, the DRC and Zambia, which has drawn $6 billion in commitments. Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal account for 75% to 80% of blended finance in West Africa, where public money is used to reduce risk for private investors. Watch: whether the $1.5 billion Africa Infrastructure Financing Facility, launched in February, grows into the kind of platform S&P describes.