ZAINAB ALMOND IS REDEFINING WHAT IT MEANS TO BUILD A CAREER IN AFRICA’S FOOD INDUSTRY

For many people, a food business begins with passion. It might start with a recipe that friends cannot stop talking about, a few orders from a home kitchen, a catering gig that turns into regular business, or simply the belief that something made with love and skill can become a livelihood. But somewhere between making something people enjoy and building a business that can survive, grow and pay its bills, the reality becomes much more complicated. This is the space Zainab Almond has spent years learning, navigating and, eventually, teaching others to understand.

A Nigerian restaurateur, food business educator, author, restaurant consultant and hospitality professional, Zainab has built her career around the business of food and the people behind it. With more than a decade of experience across different industries and within hospitality, she has worked alongside food brands, chefs, entrepreneurs and hospitality professionals, developing a practical understanding of what it takes to build and operate food businesses.

But her relationship with food did not begin with Almond Rouge. It goes much further back, to her university days at the University of Lagos, where her passion for food began taking an entrepreneurial shape. While she was a student, she started Food Cottage, an early venture that gave her the opportunity to experience the food business from the inside.

Long before she was training food entrepreneurs, writing books or consulting for hospitality businesses, Zainab was figuring things out for herself. Food Cottage gave her an early opportunity to understand customers, demand and the realities of building around a product people were willing to pay for. It was an important beginning to a journey that would eventually take her from food entrepreneur to educator and industry builder.

Her interest in food also extended beyond business. At another point in that journey, she and a friend came up with Food4Education, an initiative created to provide meals for underprivileged children in primary and secondary schools. It was another expression of the different ways food could create impact, not only as a business, but also as a means of supporting children and communities.

Over the years, those experiences continued to shape her understanding of the industry. She came to see that the biggest challenges facing food entrepreneurs were often not about whether they could make good food. They were about everything around the food: strategy, operations, financial management, people, customer experience and the systems needed to keep a business running.

That distinction sits at the heart of her work today.

Through Almond Rouge, Zainab has built an education and consulting platform focused on helping food entrepreneurs and hospitality professionals develop stronger businesses and careers. Its programmes span areas including restaurant management, kitchen operations, food-business branding and marketing, culinary tourism, food writing and food experience design. She has trained more than 1,000 people, helping entrepreneurs move from passion and ideas towards businesses with stronger foundations. Her approach is practical and grounded in the realities of the industry because she understands that a good product is only the beginning.

A restaurant can be busy and still not be profitable. A food brand can have an impressive online presence and still struggle financially. An entrepreneur can work all day and still have a business that cannot function without them.

For Zainab, these are not secondary concerns. They are the business.

Her first book, JJC Guide to Food Business Wahala: The Only Manual You Need as a Food Entrepreneur, speaks directly to those realities, addressing the lessons, mistakes and challenges that often accompany building a food business.

Her second book, No Location, More Money, takes a different assumption to task: that a serious food business must have a traditional physical location. Instead, it encourages entrepreneurs to rethink location, business models and what growth can look like.

That willingness to question conventional thinking is also visible in the way Zainab approaches hospitality careers.

For many young people, the industry is still associated with a handful of familiar roles: chef, waiter, bartender or restaurant manager. But Zainab sees a much larger ecosystem.

There are opportunities in food writing, culinary tourism, events, hospitality consulting, food business development, marketing, content, education, brand strategy and customer experience. There are specialists working behind the scenes to build the brands, businesses and experiences that customers eventually encounter.

She wants young people to see those possibilities, particularly students who may already be interested in food but have no idea how to turn that interest into an opportunity.

Drawing from her own experience of starting Food Cottage while at university, Zainab has now created a workshop specifically for university students who want to explore food business while in school but may not know where to begin. The idea is to help students understand that they can start building income and becoming financially independent while still in university, rather than waiting until graduation, or depending entirely on parents for financial support.

Through student workshops and career-focused learning experiences, she helps participants explore their interests and strengths and consider where they might fit within the wider hospitality ecosystem. A young person who loves storytelling may find a place in food writing or content. Someone fascinated by travel and culture may discover culinary tourism. Someone with an eye for branding or strategy may find a completely different path within hospitality.

It is a simple idea, but one that can change the way a person thinks about their future: sometimes people do not lack opportunities; they simply have not been exposed to them.

That wider perspective is central to what Zainab hopes to contribute to Africa’s hospitality industry. For her, the future cannot be built on great food alone. It also requires entrepreneurs who understand business, professionals who recognise the value of their skills, and young people who can see hospitality as an industry with room for many different kinds of talent.

Her work through Almond Rouge reflects that ambition. Alongside consulting and education, she continues to create courses, workshops, speaking engagements and partnerships designed to make specialised knowledge more accessible to food entrepreneurs and hospitality professionals. Almond Rouge’s positioning as a school of hospitality and food business is a natural extension of the work she has been building over time.

There is a certain symmetry in that journey.

The university student who once started Food Cottage because of her passion for food is now helping other people understand what it takes to build within the same industry. What began as an entrepreneurial experiment became experience. That experience became knowledge. And that knowledge has become something she can share with thousands of others.

Her story is therefore not simply about becoming a restaurateur or building Almond Rouge. It is about learning an industry from different sides and then using that knowledge to help other people navigate it better.

Today, Zainab is asking bigger questions about what the food industry can become. What happens when entrepreneurs understand their numbers before they scale? What happens when restaurant owners build systems instead of carrying everything themselves? What happens when young people discover that hospitality has a place for their skills even if they never become chefs?

And what happens when Africa begins to see food not only as something we consume, but as an ecosystem capable of creating businesses, careers, experiences and opportunities? Those questions sit at the centre of Zainab’s work.

Her contribution is not only measured by the people she has trained, the businesses she has consulted for, the books she has written or the platforms she has built. It is also reflected in the way she is helping people see possibilities that may have been invisible to them before.

For the entrepreneur, that possibility might be a stronger business. For the professional, it might be a new career direction. For the student, it might be the confidence to start a small food business while still in school and begin building financial independence.

And for the wider industry, it might be a future where passion is matched with knowledge, creativity with strategy, and great food with businesses capable of lasting.

The story began years ago, with a young woman at the University of Lagos and a food venture called Food Cottage.

Today, the vision is much bigger. Zainab Almond is not simply building food businesses. She is helping build the people, knowledge and possibilities around them.

And perhaps that is where the real future of Africa’s food industry lies, not only in what is on the plate, but in the people who understand how to build everything around it.