In Good Taste: Nana-Serwa Mancell, Founder, Veghana Mancell launched Veghana in Dubai in April this year, which had her merge the worlds of healthy vegan food and aromatic Ghanaian cuisine to provide a bespoke delivery and catering service in the Emirate.

This article is a part of In Good Taste, a special feature built for the August 2021 issue of Entrepreneur Middle East showcasing 10 of the UAE's most promising homegrown food brands.

For someone who is a law graduate with a career in corporate communications, and is neither a trained chef nor has had any dealings with the world of hospitality until now, one cannot be faulted for looking at Nana-Serwa Mancell quite curiously in her current role as the founder of Veghana, a Dubai-based F&B enterprise that specializes in serving plant-based West African cuisine.

But that doesn't mean you should dismiss Mancell and her endeavor either- if anything, she's following in the footsteps of entrepreneurial legends like Coco Chanel (who had no formal education to guide her way in the fashion industry), or Ariana Huffington (who had little experience in journalism before starting her eponymous blog-turned-business). Indeed, it's to her credit that Mancell is well-aware of the odds that seem to be stacked against her- and yet, she is not backing down from chasing her dream regardless.

"Every aspect of Veghana is a new learning and a new challenge, from plating food to keeping up with the strict (and necessary) municipality regulations," she says. "I describe it as being pushed blindfolded into a dark room filled with people, being spun around, then told to walk to the other side of the room, and discovering your legs are tied." It's not really a pretty picture that Mancell paints- but I must confess that it only makes me keener to understand why she continues to do what she does at Veghana.

Nana-Serwa Mancell, Founder, Veghana. Image courtesy: Veghana

Born and raised in Ghana, Mancell remembers using the food she had grown up with as a means to explore and express her identity when pursuing her education in the United Kingdom. "Back then, I was taken aback by the positive response to our traditional cuisine from my fellow students from around the world," she says. "Decades later, when I embraced a plant-based lifestyle, I found that our West African dishes had so much to offer in terms of variety, taste, and nutrition- our plants grow where ocean means rainforest. I knew I was on to a winner."

And that's how Mancell ended up launching Veghana in Dubai in April this year, which had her merge the worlds of healthy vegan food and aromatic Ghanaian cuisine to provide a bespoke delivery and catering service in the Emirate. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with West African cuisine, Mancell has a couple of stats to get you up to speed with this particular kind of food- and also showcase why Veghana is well-poised to make it big as a business.

"Pinterest, with 320 million users around the world, included West African recipes in its top 100 trends for 2020 after searches for West African food grew by 311%," she notes. "That's a lot of people who want to find out about our cuisine. Also, American food giant Whole Foods included West African cuisine in its top ten food trends for 2020. And there are very few suppliers to meet this interest. Even if you looked internationally, you would be hard-pressed to find vegan African restaurants, so in Dubai, we are certainly the sole occupants in our sector. What we offer -very tasty comfort food- is something not usually associated with vegan food, and this pushes us further to the front."

Related: In Good Taste: Ambika Rajgopal, Founder, Haute Sauce

Image courtesy: Veghana

And the reception Veghana has received is proof of this, Mancell adds. "I am particularly pleased that we have built a base of repeat customers made up of various nationalities, ages, and backgrounds. People who order regularly don't seem to have much in common other than their city of residence and ability to navigate our website- this proves to me the popularity of our cuisine, which makes people coming back for more."

While it's still early days for Veghana as an enterprise, Mancell has been making use of the reaction she has got to it thus far as fuel for the big dreams she has for the brand. "Veghana officially launched in April this year, and I've been overwhelmed by the positive response to the food and the brand," she says. "According to my business plan, it should take another year before I could host a pop-up restaurant in a major venue- my long-held dream. SEVA, Dubai's iconic vegan destination, called me one month after launch, inviting me to host a pop-up in their gorgeous venue- I dropped my phone in excitement! The event was sold out and a huge success, and we are now planning pop-up events with other choice venues across the city."

Let it be noted here that Mancell puts a lot of thought and effort into the events that she hosts- and there's a larger reason behind it than just her business. "Veghana is not just about food, but also art, culture, music, and conversation," she explains. "Our events are intentionally a sensory overload experience in attempt to undo the negative connotations around Africa; an explosion of sound, sight, and taste that we know people find totally compelling."

Image courtesy: Veghana

But it hasn't been all smooth sailing either. For instance, when it comes to marketing her brand, Mancell, who has shied away from social media all her life, has been on a learning curve in terms of using platforms like, say, Instagram, for her brand, but again, that hasn't stopped her from working on it all the same- as she puts it: "I do the posts whilst waiting for things to boil!" But don't take Mancell's unfamiliarity with social media to mean that she's a novice at marketing- on the contrary, she's extremely clear on what her business needs to win in the landscape it operates in.

"It would be a mistake to judge your success by the number of likes on your posts," she says. "Getting this following to translate into actual and increasing sales is a real challenge. Luckily, for me, I have lifelong experience in marketing, and understand what many of my contemporaries miss, which is not worry about what to post, but instead follow a strategic path to raise your brand awareness- and then those posts will write themselves. We create more content than we can share, but I'm very strict about sticking to our marketing strategy, no matter how good a picture looks."

With ideas like these governing how Mancell is going about building her brand, the future does look to be bright for the business, and she is certainly excited to see how things unfold in the long term. "Launching my West African cuisine in the vegan space means I'm a big fish in a small but growing pond," she notes. "And I would no way would get anywhere near as much attention, if I had to compete in the non-vegan sector with all the marvelous F&B concepts popping up all the time. But the vegan sector is growing exponentially, and we are part of a tidal wave that may be as yet only just building up momentum."

GET THE GREEN LIGHT: Veghana founder Nana-Serwa Mancell shares her tips for wannabe entrepreneurs aiming to follow her lead

Don't delay, do it now "Don't wait to be personally ready to take the leap to launch a product or be an entrepreneur- you may never be ready. Do your research, of course, but just start."

Don't wait for your idea to be 100% perfect "Go with your gut. You can fix the rest as you go along- if you try to work it all out perfectly in your head, it may never happen."

Ask for favors "People are surprisingly more generous than you think, especially fellow entrepreneurs."

Network, network, network "There are so many untapped worlds out there waiting to offer you so many solutions and opportunities that you won't even know about until you tap."

Remember that social media is a tactic and not a strategy "Learn about traditional marketing, understand messaging and objective setting, focus on your growth strategy, and not just the pretty pictures to post."

Look into your red tape before you start "A year comes so quickly- you will have to be renewing that license fee sooner than you think. I got my business license a full six months before we could legally supply food."

Related: In Good Taste: Ramie Murray, Founder And CEO, Dibba Bay Oysters