As South Africa celebrates Heritage Month, Khuliswa Mazizi, the founder of Kusta’s Kitchen, is pioneering a food revolution rooted in indigenous African ingredients. Driven by personal loss and inspired by resilience, she is proving that food can be both nourishment and medicine while supporting small-scale farmers and tackling the rise of lifestyle diseases in South Africa.

The journey of Khuliswa Mazizi

Mazizi, a supply chain strategist by profession and the innovative founder and CEO of Tano Lemon, trading as Kusta’s Kitchen, was born and bred in the Eastern Cape. Mazizi is leading the way in the development of functional meals and drinks made with native African ingredients from her base at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria. "My family’s battle with lifestyle diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer has inspired me to develop healthy, affordable and therapeutic food products for all South Africans, irrespective of their financial situation, to end the ongoing pattern," Mazizi says.

Having lost most of her close relatives to lifestyle-related illnesses, Mazizi sought to understand the underlying causes and discovered that 45% of what kills people is the food they consume. Her findings showed that diet and lack of exercise contribute to about half of the risk. That realisation led her to take another approach, viewing food as both medicine and nourishment.

The decision resulted in the establishment of Kusta’s Kitchen, a food innovation company based in Pretoria that specialises in producing 100% delicious and nutritious goods using locally sourced African ingredients. Kusta’s Kitchen now offers 13 unique products, including pre-cooked sorghum meals, hibiscus and baobab juices, sorghum-and-ginger smoothies, and gluten-free sauces. All these products are locally sourced from small-scale farmers and contain no added or refined sugar or preservatives.

Mazizi started small and managed to secure a production facility, enabling her team to work in an environment that encourages development. However, there have been challenges related to scaling up. Managing stock levels, sourcing products from local farmers, maintaining consistent quality, and meeting increasing demand have tested Mazizi’s resilience. Purchasing locally is one of her core values. By buying directly from small-scale farmers, she not only guarantees the quality of her products but also helps create jobs and support the farming community. That means a better local economy, more employment and more children attending school.

The role of Inhlanyelo Hub NPC

For Mazizi, being an entrepreneur has always felt like an isolated path, filled with obstacles, uncertainty, and times when it seemed easier to give up than to keep going. Her decision to join the Unisa subsidiary, Inhlanyelo Hub, thus marked a significant shift in her business journey. Knowing that she needed a community of like-minded people, she joined Inhlanyelo Hub, despite not fully understanding the full range of services offered.

At the Inhlanyelo Hub, Mazizi discovered a network of business owners at all phases of development, a secure environment for exchanging ideas and mentors who provided not only direction but also accountability. She was especially impressed by how the Hub's principles of impact, sustainability and inclusive growth aligned with her own company's strategy.

Message to other entrepreneurs

Mazizi has a message for other entrepreneurs: "Inhlanyelo Hub provided me with a mentor, which was extremely beneficial. He encouraged me to implement simple yet effective techniques that enhanced my business operations. For instance, formalising sales monitoring and reconciliation procedures and creating a WhatsApp Business account transformed my approach to managing clients, deliveries and payments."

She continues: "Thanks to the Inhlanyelo Hub, I gained discipline and the confidence to think long-term and build a sustainable business. I learned the value of self-pacing and scaling responsibly by establishing pricing models, finding trustworthy suppliers and setting up stock management systems before signing major contracts."

Navigating business growth and challenges

"The journey of Kusta’s Kitchen has been both fulfilling and challenging," says Mazizi. "As demand for my products has grown, I’ve had to find the right balance between increasing production capacity and preserving product quality. Committing to sourcing from local farms aligns with my values but has occasionally made operations challenging, particularly when higher numbers are needed to meet the demand."

Despite challenges, Mazizi’s determination is constant. She is determined to continue her work because she has seen lifestyle diseases steal the lives of her parents and siblings. Every time she feels like giving up, she remembers the suffering caused by losing loved ones and the fact that these illnesses are preventable.

Mazizi highlights that persistence yields results. Currently, Kusta’s Kitchen is in advanced discussions with Food Lovers Market for nationwide distribution and is accessible in a few Pretoria SPAR locations. Mazizi, however, is clear: expansion needs to be planned. "If you scale too quickly without proper systems in place, you run the risk of compromising sustainability and quality," she says.

She currently uses Instagram and TikTok to engage with consumers and promote her products, but she is also exploring e-commerce as a means to reach a broader market. Her philosophy is simple: "Africa is rich. Many of the world's problems already have answers within our own territory, among our people, and in our traditions. All we need to do is trust what we have."

* Submitted by Inhlanyelo Hub NPC