Food & BeverageOpen

Design a Waste-to-Product Model for Lagos Restaurant Food Waste

Create a business model and operational blueprint for a startup that converts unsold food from Lagos restaurants into a usable product, whether animal feed, compost, biogas, or a repurposed food product. Lagos generates enormous volumes of commercial food waste with almost no formal recovery infrastructure.

The brief

Lagos has thousands of restaurants, buka joints, hotel kitchens, and catering operations producing leftover food daily. Most of it goes into general waste, contributing to the city's severe solid waste problem. There is no coordinated collection system, no price signal for organic waste, and the informal sector that does recover some waste (pig farmers, for instance, who collect from certain kitchens) operates with no formal contracts or quality standards. At the same time, inputs that could be produced from food waste are in demand. Poultry and fish farmers struggle with high feed costs. Urban composting is a growing market. Biogas production is attracting startup investment. The raw material exists; the logistics and business model do not. Your deliverable is a business model document structured around a specific output product (you choose one and defend it). Cover: the waste collection model and which restaurant types or zones you would target first, the conversion process and any technology or partnership required, the end buyer and the price they would pay, your cost structure and the path to unit-level profitability, and the regulatory or health considerations you would need to address. Include a simple one-page operational flow diagram showing waste collection through to sale. Strong submissions will have talked to at least two potential customers (a farm, a garden centre, a fuel buyer) and at least one restaurant or catering operation, and will reflect those conversations in the model. Do not design a solution that requires a grant to survive past year one.