- Kepas Melodi worked as a foreman at a fresh produce market in Hazyview, which had a shortage of spinach.
- He took it upon himself to meet the demand by planting spinach in his backyard and supplying his previous employer.
- After seeing that he made more money as a supplier than an employee, he quit his job to focus on farming.
- Today, Melodi owns a 24-hectare farm and supplies hundreds of Shoprite and Checkers stores.
South African farmer Kepas Melodi started small in his back yard, and now he supplies fresh green beans to the Shoprite Group, one of the biggest retailers in the country.
It all started in the early 2000s when Melodi worked as a foreman at a fresh produce market in Hazyview, Mpumalanga. There was a spinach shortage, and Melodi took it upon himself to meet the demand by planting spinach in his own backyard.
“Somewhere in October, we ran out of spinach,” said Melodi. “I then went to my backyard and started planting, and supplying the place where I worked.”
Melodi’s farming side hustle proved to be worth it as he started making more money from it than at his actual job.
In 2006, the farmer procured six hectares of land and left his job to focus solely on growing his spinach farming business.
Although farming has become a profitable business for Melodi, he never thought that he would one day pursue a career in farming.
“This is something that happened because there was a need. When you are still young, you think of a lot of career paths, but as you get older, you realise where your strengths and opportunities lie,” he said.
After farming spinach for years, Melodi felt he wanted to move on to crops that he could harvest almost all year round, and spinach wasn’t really that.
“Spinach went very well. I still plant it but it doesn’t sell well enough. The amount of supply changes as seasons change, so with green beans you can plan how much you want to harvest in a year, and prices don’t fluctuate that much.
“There’s a huge gap in the beans market, that’s why I went there,” said the agricultural entrepreneur.
In 2010 Melodi was approached by international investors who worked with government and were willing to help grow his farm.
“They wanted to do farming with me and found that the vegetables were thriving. They gave me all I needed for two hectares of farming. I worked on the two hectares of land. When they came back they saw potential in the farm.
“They [along with government officials] told me that they had found a distributor for me which was Freshmark Distribution Centre for Shoprite, and they will buy my produce,” he said.
Melodi would need to find a gap in the market, and then, with a lot of help started building his pack house for the produce.
Working with a big suppler
As of 2013, Melodi, who now owns 24 hectares of land and has nine permanent employees, started supplying fresh produce to Freshmark.
He now supplies green beans and other vegetables such a butternut, tomatoes, chilies, and cabbage, to hundreds of Shoprite and Checkers outlets within Gauteng.
Even with all his success, Melodi concedes that supplying retailers as big as Shoprite and Checkers was not easy when he started out.
“There were a lot of challenges. The first one was getting the necessary certification. When trying to get that certificate you learn how to pack things, third grade, second grade, how to pick them, how long the green beans are going to last once we put them onto the shelves.
“You need to put a sell-by date on the green beans, and you don’t know how many days your green beans will last once you pick them. There were actually a lot of challenges,” he said.
Although it took some time to get over those challenges, Melodi says he was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who helped him a lot and even organised training for him to gain all the expertise he needed to flourish in the industry.
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