I saw a TV advert about this guy or this character called Vuyo who was selling boerewors rolls on this TV campaign. It was a Hansa Beer TV campaign. I googled to discover there was no Vuyo, he was a totally fictitious guy.

When I started with Vuyo's, coming from a different field, there was a lot of learning. I subsequently studied as a chef because my frustration was, when dealing with the kitchen, they could see that I didn't understand what they were talking about.

I'm actually conflicted about that. I really think not everybody's an entrepreneur, nor should they be an entrepreneur. The word entrepreneur has had a challenge of late. It's a catch-all phrase for anybody who is not employed by somebody, and I disagree with that. If you use it as a catch-all phrase, it means your policies are not going to be correct because entrepreneurs are not homogenous.

I think it's very important for organisations, particularly startups, to have global ambitions, having worked for a company that fundamentally understood that I'm their biggest fan. I think Africa, even particularly South Africa, has got the biggest opportunities. I was in the US this time last year and hadn't been for a while. The previous time to the one I went last year, you could feel the difference.

I was cynical of the whole incubator/accelerator space. As a true entrepreneur, I believe the world is not a Petri dish. You shouldn't be mollycoddled into success. It's one of those things that I think has an unintended consequence - if you mollycoddle anything, the intent is good, but almost always the result is the opposite effect that you would like to achieve.

There's a lot of learning that happens in real time because there's no basis for experience. You don't have people that you can reach out to. So there are pros and cons to that. The pros are that, when you learn for yourself, you're unlikely to forget those lessons. 

There's absolutely nothing easy about the food industry. I really think you need to be a sucker for punishment to do it because it's a craft man. It looks sexy, I think maybe that's why people do it. It looks remarkably simple on the outside. Who doesn't want a place named after them, where they can sit and eat the food and drink and romance customers?

Retaining a passion while building the business is probably one of the toughest things to do if you don't have certain attributes. One is purpose. If you don't have a purpose, it becomes very hard because it's likely that you are doing it for the wrong reasons.

FoodTech excites me tremendously because it gives us two things. It gives us the ability to have great impact, exponentially. The other thing is that it democratises food. 

I think the food industry is going through a great renaissance. In the last five years, we've seen alternative protein or plant-based alternatives to meat. I've got guys working on some amazing stuff in our accelerator, working on plant-based desserts for example, or dairy-free desserts. There's a lot of stuff, anti-sugar movements, there's a lot of high tech that's happening in that space.