Hakeem Jimo: Veggie Victory
Species Unite
elizabeth novogratz
5.0 • 911 Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2021
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"A friend of mine in Germany is called Dr. Tofu. He was the first who did tofu on a commercial scale, in the eighties. They arrested him… for cooking something suspicious… He was arrested a couple of times.
So, when it started in Nigeria and we opened the first vegan restaurant and there were also no vegetarian restaurants, people were saying, that's crazy. Why do you do that? But I knew kind of that time was on our side. - Hakeem Jimo
Hakeem Jimo is the co-founder of Veggie Victory, Nigeria's first plant-based food tech company. Hakeem and his partner, Bola Adeyanju also founded V Café, Nigeria's first vegan restaurant in 2013. V Café is in Lagos and serves veganized Nigerian culinary delicacies to vegans, meat eaters and everyone in between.
A few years after opening the restaurant, Hakeem and Bola began producing VChunks, a seitan-based meat alternative that was created to pair beautifully with most Nigerian cuisine.
VChunks are dehydrated so that they can be kept on shelves for months and do not need refrigeration, which is not an option for many in parts of Nigeria.
Hakeem is Nigerian-German, was born and raised in Germany and has lived in West Africa for the past 27 years. Before becoming a vegan food and tech entrepreneur, he worked in journalism and public relations.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Species, unites, unites. |
| 0:03.0 | Species, unite. |
| 0:05.0 | Species. |
| 0:07.0 | Unite, |
| 0:11.0 | Species unite. Species unite. and also no vegetarian restaurant. People were saying, you know, that's crazy, why do you do that? But I knew kindats. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a |
| 0:45.9 | spare minute could you please rate and review species unite on Apple |
| 0:50.7 | Podcast or wherever you listen to Podcasts. It really helps people to find the show. |
| 0:57.0 | This conversation is with Hakkem Jimo. |
| 1:04.0 | Hakem is co-founder of Veggie Victory, Nigeria's first plant-based food tech company. Hakim, thank you so much for doing this today. |
| 1:27.0 | I'm really excited to have you here. |
| 1:29.4 | Yeah, thank you, Beth. |
| 1:30.6 | You were born and raised in Germany and went vegetarian in Germany and I lived in Germany as a kid until my last year of high school. |
| 1:38.0 | Oh cool. And I went vegetarian when I was like 13 when like there was zero. |
| 1:45.0 | You couldn't get a salad without ham. |
| 1:49.0 | And I was like, oh my God, somebody understands because I didn't know a soul that was vegetarian. |
| 1:57.0 | So let's start, let's just start back then. |
| 2:00.4 | But it's not as bad as I lived for a few months in upstate New York and there was one place in town that they had a donut with bacon on it. |
| 2:08.6 | Oh, come on. |
| 2:09.2 | I mean that is, I'm telling you, you know, I was just laughing. I was so bad I was just laughing I was so bad I was just laughing. I mean now Germany's like the |
| 2:18.4 | vegan Mecca you know there's so much good vegan food but back then it was not so good. |
| 2:25.2 | Yeah. |
| 2:26.2 | It really was. |
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