Sylva Professional Catering Services Limited

Sylva Catering has always been a family-owned business. Her success has come from identifying a strong market niche, diversifying within this niche, targeting local and export markets, and training her suppliers and employees to meet her exacting standards.
“Sylva Catering’s core business is the promotion of indigenous Zambian foods,” Sylvia explains, “but within this, we address a number of food issues from food preservation to food preparation.” Her website goes further: “Our mission is to promote healthy eating habits in Zambia, encourage the consumption of nutritious foods, and to offer the highest quality training in the hospitality industry and thereby ensure the best corporate and national practices. We want to be the leading traditional food marketing and personal development organization in Zambia and beyond.”

Sylva Catering, the flagship enterprise in the business, offers catering services at “all levels and scales” for “both the Zambian and international clientele.” It is based at the University of Zambia’s (UNZA) Great East Road campus in Lusaka in the Main Dining Hall, and at the country’s National Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Sylvia argues that the university location enhances the public image of her business, and provides support capacity for her short- and long-term professional training programs.

From her core business, Sylvia has expanded into processing and packaging traditional Zambian foodstuffs with Sylva Food Solutions. Her products include unprocessed (pure) Zambian honey, millet, dried seeds like pumpkin and pounded groundnuts, dried herbs, a variety of vegetables like garlic, cassava, okra, and African eggplant, and proteins like dried fish and game meats. These products are sold locally and exported to other African countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique.

Her latest business has been to design and sell advanced food processing equipment like the Sylva Solar Food Dryer. The food dryers exemplify how Sylvia tries to help small-scale and rural farmers in Zambia become more competitive. The equipment dries food about 5-10 times faster than can be achieved through “bare sun drying.” It minimizes contact between the farmer and the food, which helps meet the stringent hygiene requirements of Sylvia’s export market and the safety needs of local consumers. It increases the freshness and nutrient content of farmers’ products. Its portability means it can be taken from field to field, or family to family. Finally, the dryer prevents waste, since unsold food products can be dried and then sold at a higher market value or kept for personal consumption.

More generally, Sylvia has succeeded by bringing more and more of her business under her own control. She trains suppliers and employees herself to ensure quality products and customer service, without losing sight of her core business.

Committed to expanding the income opportunities of farmers in Zambia, Sylvia has also partnered with a number of development organizations, both local and international. “We have undertaken several assignments under the auspices of many government institutions like the Ministry of Community Development and non- governmental organizations like Agriculture Support Programme (ASIP), CARE International Zambia, IDE, Catholic Relief Services (CRS), and World Vision Zambia, respectively. Through these partnerships we are reaching out to various vulnerable groups in rural Zambia. Our goal is to bring together a number of common interest groups with the basic aim of developing and inculcating better nutritional values and bringing economic emancipation directly to rural dwellers.”

Sylvia uses these partnerships in several different ways. She encourages individual farmers to form or join marketing associations. She trains farmers on harvesting methods, the curative and medicinal values of indigenous plants and foods, and the principles of hygienic food preparation and preservation. She preaches sound environmental management by, for example, teaching methods for reducing the use of pesticide. Her workshops promote the idea that hunger can be reduced by growing local food and reducing reliance on imported foodstuffs.

For Sylvia, partnering with rural and small farmers makes business sense and represents the kind of service she believes a business should provide to its community. Her trainees are obliged to sell to her. More importantly, the 5,000 farmers she has trained thus far are “able to improve their economic status and send their children to school from the money that they raise through improved production.”