it started as a joke. then we bought wheels. then we bought a sign. this is the part where you realise a joke can become a small business.
go to any fair, any kids' party, any school event in this country and try — really try — to find something to eat that isn't 90% sugar and 10% food colouring. you will not. there will be cupcakes the colour of a swimming pool. there will be doughnuts. there will be a candy floss machine staffed by a teenager who is, frankly, doing his best.
this is fine, occasionally. it is not fine as the entire offering. and yet, every single time, the entire offering is exactly that.
we kept saying ‘someone should fix this.’ then at some point we ran out of someones.
so we bought wheels
the original plan was a tray. then a small folding table. then somewhere along the way the words ‘actually, what if it had wheels’ were said out loud, and that was that. a snack cart was happening. we did not have a business plan. we had a colour palette.
the snacks themselves are the point: things kids actually like, but that aren't trying to give a six-year-old a heart event. fruit, savoury bits, the occasional treat that hasn't been engineered in a lab. a sandwich, even. radical.
and then it moved cities
snackies is now in mombasa, being run by a family member, which is the most snackies thing about snackies. it was supposed to be a one-off. it is somehow a small operation. parents seem genuinely relieved. kids are mostly fine with it — turns out if you put a snack on a cart with a sign, they'll eat it.
we don't really know where it goes next. maybe nowhere. maybe a second cart. maybe we'll wake up one morning and there will be six of them and a whatsapp group we don't remember joining. that's sort of the joy of it.
if you want to see what it actually looks like in the wild, snackieskenya on instagram. (the photos are better than this blog post. fair warning.)
that's the post.
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