Why I Left Mozambique
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay and become a business mogul?” my business partner and mentor Dan asked me tongue in cheek. This was two months before I was planning to leave Montepuez where our food distribution (his parent company) and food processing (my little factory) businesses were trudging along. He asked half jokingly but waited on a serious answer.
Let me rewind to the start. My journey toward a sustainable, job-creating peanut butter factory started in May 2018 in Niassa province, while I was still a Peace Corps volunteer. Out of a desire to create jobs for several of my worthy high school students in Majune province — otherwise, they would return to subsistence farming or selling phone credits — I submitted a grant proposal to the U.S. Embassy to build a peanut butter factory. In August, we were awarded $25,000. Fourteen months later, the project promptly flopped. That was a sour lesson in the importance of trusting partners. We had the grinders, jars, peanuts, factory rooms, and my hopeful three employees. Most importantly*, I had confirmed that a market existed by consulting 11 store managers in Lichinga who sold peanut butter, asking whether and at what price they would buy ours. So, we perfected our product quality and consistency and cranked out hundreds of jars. Finally, after brochures and samples and a radio jingle, one prominent grocery store bought our peanut butter.
*I say most importantly because my prior attempt at a similar effort in Mumbai, India, to set up an origami earring business failed because I never inquired beforehand whether jewelry shops would sell such a product. This was after I had already taught women residing in the slums how to produce these earrings, which was a joy in and of itself.
Sadly, as soon as I left the country for medical school interviews in November 2020, the local nonprofit I had partnered with to manage this factory ceased communication. In the preceding months, salaries were not paid and production halted. In retrospect, I skimped on vetting for an invested local counterpart. This was international development 101. With my fleeting time on the ground, however, I don’t know whether I would have succeeded even with everything I know now. To build a profitable business, leave the foreign country, and expect it to continue growing is a risky bet regardless of how many clients are won, how many financial projections updated, how many years spent. An essential factor in our current factory churning out two tons of peanut butter a month — and growing — even as I sit here typing in Rochester, Minnesota, is that Dan and Calisto, my factory manager, are on the ground.
In 2021, in the middle of my first year of medical school, I reconnected with Dan after learning about his agricultural business endeavors in Cabo Delgado. Almost like fate, he was the first American I met in Mozambique when I flew in solo on the wrong flight as a newly minted Peace Corps volunteer back in September 2017. He was from the preceding cohort and became our first trainer during orientation in Namaacha, a lush and serene town just outside the capital city.
We have different personalities, but particular commonalities. As volunteers, we were both situated in the north, i.e., rural Mozambique. The Peace Corps admin tries to match each volunteer’s personality and preference to a synergistic town. We were the two volunteers who had handmade our own elaborate backyard gyms — his was metal-based, mine was made of wood and bamboo. We both thrived in and loved our rural communities, hauling buckets of water every day. And we both concluded that the people around us merited employment, and that the best chance for that would be through agricultural business. Most importantly, we both acted.
Through the four years from 2022 to 2025, I resided with Dan at his company RW Machambas’s premises in Montepuez, Cabo Delgado. The mastermind was Richard, a deft British-Zimbabwean businessman who founded RW Machambas in 2016, which Dan joined as a co-director in 2018 after concluding his Peace Corps service. The business followed the textbook model of sustainable economic development. Simple to conceptualize, near impossible to execute effectively. I will touch on the various difficulties in a separate blog, but the core idea is as follows: buy produce from regional smallholder farmers and sell to regional commercial kitchens.
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When I first visited them in 2021, the company had just constructed its packing house with two dedicated cold rooms. Until then, fresh produce had been limited to tomatoes stored in a small A/C room, or beans in their living room. Dan had been upgraded from a guest room in Richard’s house to a small independent room. There had been months before when he lived in a tent. When I moved in in July 2022, I was generously provided a small room as well. We could not afford extra A/Cs, so we bided through most months with a fan or two.
During my four years, I never ceased to learn the ropes of the agricultural business and the peripheral operations, as growth and innovation were continuous. Our core business gradually expanded beyond fresh fruits and vegetables into eggs, meat, cheese, candies, and miscellaneous procurement like machine parts or Asian groceries. We extended our reach into hydroponics farming, mushroom cultivation, construction, lodging, and a mechanics workshop. I would feed black soldier flies while overseeing a hospital rehabilitation project.
Peanut butter sales were slow, frankly, for the first three years, and occupied only a fraction of my time. Slow, largely because most of my clientele was the retail market. It takes years to alter grocery shoppers’ habits enough for them to pick up a new peanut butter brand. One of my earlier mistakes was selling a large volume of jars to a regional retail distributor. At first, I was elated to have won this unprecedented order of more than 600 jars. Two years later, a third of the stock remained on their shelves. I agreed to swap these expired jars with new jars. We made a net loss. Start small and cycle fast. I had done the opposite.
Looking back, I would have grown the peanut butter business faster by loosening my obsession with the retail industry. I was convinced that in the long run, since the majority of peanut butter consumption in Mozambique passes through retail markets via more expensive South African peanut butter brands, it was prudent to focus my energy there. The smarter solution was to first win over the catering companies that RW Machambas already served.
Today, over 90% of our revenue comes from sales to these multinational catering companies. Like many successful companies, luck played a sizeable role. TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil in particular were resuming operations of their new LNG facility in Palma, northern Mozambique. TotalEnergies had maintained force majeure on its project from April 2021 to October 2025 due to insurgency attacks. The catering companies that won the commercial kitchens for the subcontractors were the same companies we already supplied produce for at other mining operations. I had the honor of supervising the first delivery, driving through burnt villages and dried blood marks of beheaded victims, arriving at the surreal, 6,000-hectare high-security site. As more workers were brought in, our peanut butter sales grew.
The key to growth is winning the first sizeable contract. From there, the cash flow and new supply chains permit product experimentation to win further clients. Meaning, this single sizeable source of revenue buys us the time and resources to improve our factory so we can explore new outlets, including the retail market. In just six months, our monthly peanut butter sales grew from 300 kg to 2 tons. We are now finishing up an extension of the factory for an 80-ton storage capacity. This is the backdrop to when Dan asked me the question.
“No, I don’t think I can let go of medicine,” I responded cautiously. Looking back at my journey from my first peanut butter jar seven years ago, I am proud of how far we have come. We. I don’t know how significant my contribution was. I feel I’ve continued to fumble around with teamwork and communication, and still have too much to learn from Dan and Rich. But at the least, I achieved the goal of building a factory that will continue paying salaries even after I leave. And so I, together with Iori*, departed in November 2025.
*A significant factor at play was family. My wife, Iori, who managed the packing house at RW Machambas, was seven months pregnant with our son, and we hoped to give birth in Japan for safety and affordability.
Yet, in the back of my mind, I wasn’t truly leaving. I may have left the premise, but the journey was too exciting and meaningful to separate from. I will never not be “busy,” especially in medicine, much less during third year of medical school. But as my mentor in college once said, “Time is something you make, not find.” If I prioritize something, I will have the time for it (like writing this blog). So, I continue to have weekly catch-ups with Calisto, assist with new product graphics, and manage material procurement from China. As the factory construction proceeds, I am designing the airflow requirements for us to one day receive HACCP certification and unlock export potential. As long as the operation grinds on, I will return, hopefully not too far.
