Freshbag

Connecting the farm to the street vendor.

🇨🇲 Cameroon Logistics & Supply ChainShut down

Epitaph

“Here lies Freshbag. It linked Cameroon's smallholder farmers straight to Yaoundé's street vendors, cutting out the middlemen. The vendors, it turned out, preferred the informal handshake to a digital contract, and the produce kept moving faster than the payments.”

Overview

Born: 2019 (Year)
Died: August 2024 (Month)
Lifespan: 6 years
Fate: Shut down
Headquarters: 🇨🇲 Cameroon
Category: Logistics & Supply Chain
Stage at death: Seed
Primary cause: Distribution or go-to-market
Contributing causes: Business model or unit economics, Infrastructure dependency

Death certificate

Timeline

2019Founding
Brice Mvogo founds Freshbag to connect Cameroonian smallholder farmers with urban street vendors
September 2020Seed funding
Freshbag secures investment from GreenTec Capital Partners

Autopsy report

Why did Freshbag shut down?

Freshbag, a Cameroonian agritech startup that connected smallholder farmers directly to urban street vendors via a digital procurement platform, shut down after struggling with the volatility of the informal vendor market, high churn, revenue leakage, and the logistical costs of its Yaounde-based supply chain; sources place the closure between 2023 and August 2024.

What Freshbag attempted

Freshbag, founded in 2019 by Brice Mvogo, ran a digital procurement platform in Cameroon sourcing fresh produce directly from smallholder farmers and agricultural cooperatives and delivering it to urban street vendors in Yaounde, aiming to cut out traditional middlemen and reduce post-harvest losses.

What worked

Freshbag secured early seed investment from GreenTec Capital Partners in 2020 and built partnerships with farming cooperatives and street vendors to move produce to urban markets.

What happened

Freshbag struggled with the inherent volatility of informal street vendors, who were often reluctant to commit to formal contracts or digital tracking. This drove high churn and revenue leakage, compounded by the logistical costs of its Yaounde-based supply chain and broader scalability challenges, ultimately leading to the platform's closure.

Lessons for future builders

Digitising an informal supply chain collapses when the vendors will not stay in it. Before funding delivery routes and working capital, get vendors to commit to orders and tracking, and confirm the logistics cost per drop still leaves a margin.