Heavy Chef Of The Week: Sebastian Daniels, Ground Culture.
Our Heavy Chef of the Week is Sebastian Daniels.
A serial entrepreneur and writer, Sebastian is the founder of Ground Culture.
He’s passionate about combining his love for coffee and social impact.
His goal is to continue to make a sustainable impact on township economies in SA.
Heart is in the right place, check. Coffee lover, check. It’s quite clear why we’re fans!
Each week we select a ‘Heavy Chef Of The Week’, someone who espouses the values that we hold dear. This is someone who’s either a technologist, leader or creative, who is changing the world by rolling up their sleeves, getting stuck into the trenches and doing. This is someone who is walking the talk, acting with authenticity - who is eating their own food.
This week, we're celebrating the work of Sebastian Daniels, a writer and the founder of Ground Culture. Sebastian is passionate about making a sustainable impact on SA's informal economy, and one of the ways he plans to do this is through coffee.
Coffee is more than just a magic elixir we have to thank for the actualisation of many dreams and ideas. For some, coffee is the dream itself, the lifeline they have decided to take in order to bring purpose and meaning to their lives and those of the people around them. At Heavy Chef, we’re particularly fond of coffee entrepreneurs because we know the grit and hard work that goes into making a great cup of coffee. We're coffee lovers who love other coffee lovers. Especially coffee lovers like Sebastian who've combined their love for cuppa with their love for the people.
We chatted to Sebastian about his journey as an entrepreneur and asked him what his secret ingredient is.
Tell us about yourself, where you are from and what you are passionate about?
I grew up in Cape Town and had quite a different upbringing as both my parents are journalists. I grew up with a very different idea of the world, where I was very exposed to what was happening in South Africa, watching the news every evening, seeing my mom on TV and going to protests during my holidays. It was an odd upbringing, but it really helped me get to the crux of South Africa's problems. And then, growing up, I kind of adapted a bit of a business mindset and loved selling stuff around the neighborhood, just seeing what I could do and how I could make a quick buck. Over time, this kind of developed when the two merged, and I began to find out how you can make a real social impact with a business-driven model. And that's kind of led me to years and years of starting different businesses and failing a lot, I must say. Yet learning a lot from those failures and taking that with me. Now I'm at the point where I'm doing something I love.
Where does your passion for working with underserved communities stem from?
I think it kind of developed over time. I was president of the UCT entrepreneur society once, and that's when I really started engaging with entrepreneurs on the ground and entrepreneurs in university. It was really interesting because I was head of the society of like 500 members, but none of them had that chutzpah to really like go out and do it. It was always, okay, we've got to get the funding first. And then I launched a business called Yethu, which is a stokvel management app. And we kind of failed there. We won a lot of national competitions, but we ended up failing because we didn't understand the township economy and the informal economy in South Africa properly.
What went wrong?
We took a wide perspective and tried to solve other people's problems when the people solve their own problems. I then made a commitment to come back to Khayelitsha once a week, every week to hang out at Siki's Koffee Kafe with Siya and a whole lot of other people, and just understand the informal economy better. And that's when I started to see this drive in these entrepreneurs of Khayelitsha, it was really to something different. There was an energy inside them and it didn't necessarily have to do with the fact that they had business degrees. Yes, people may have lacked the skills, but they had the chutzpah and the drive. So that's what I really back and that's what really gets me excited. It pumps me up. You've got to have the right attitude. And that's why I love working with township entrepreneurs.
Can you tell us about your current venture, Ground Culture?
Ground Culture in itself is actually a very new enterprise. I came up with the concept two days after lockdown because my previous business, Coffe Shop Blues, which is a predecessor to Ground Culture, almost disappeared overnight. Coffee Shop Blues started from my Dad being a journalist and writing a column for the Sunday Times and the Weekend August called Sunny Side Up, which is a breakfast review column. So I started doing that too and I wrote 130 copy shop reviews. I wrote about independent coffee shops in Cape town and that's how I came in touch with Siki's. I then tried to tie them together but I needed something more. So I started working with township-based entrepreneurs and selling their products to the coffee shops I worked with. After over a year I got up to about 75 coffee shops buying the products. I was working with about six or seven entrepreneurs, not only township entrepreneurs, but also suburban-based entrepreneurs because they too want to give back and we need everyone to work together.
And then COVID hits and, lo and behold, 70 of those 75 coffee shops closed down. About five operated, delis. And then for that three week period, I made almost no income. But just before that, I tried to get rid of my stuck and I made 23 sales in the three days before lockdown. And that got me thinking, could there be something here? Maybe I should take this online and maybe I should do what people have been telling me to do. And now it's developed and grown and we've launched and done about 350 orders since May. We then decided to take another step and got everything on Uber Eats. You can access all our products there, by townships, suburban, whatever - all the way from Clifton through to Claremont. We're really growing and hoping to make township products incredibly accessible.
Future plans for the business?
We've just bought some foundations in Observatory and opened a small two by four retail store. We're really just trying it as a concept for now but we want to see if we can bring that full experience to the end customer.
