‘I started business with N250,000’

  The Chief Executive, Simply Green, Shola Ladoja, is an entrepreneur whose natural juices success story has become a source of inspiration to start-ups.

With national demand for juices on the rise, Chief  Executive, Simply Green, Shola Ladoja is a diligent producer.

He started the business with N250, 000 in  May 2014.

Little by little, the business began to grow and turnover increased.

The company is one of the fastest growing fruit juice companies in a fiercely competitive environment, it is now worth millions.

Ladoja started the firm primarily because he wanted to drink juice not knowing it was going to be a successful business.


Before moving back to Lagos from New York, he drank green juice almost everyday.

But upon returning to Nigeria, he couldn’t find any good quality juice, so he created one to cater for his needs and that of other people like him.

Simply Green Juices is Nigeria’s first farm-to-bottle organic cold-pressed juice company promoting healthy living and sustainable agriculture at the same time.  The juice it produces is 100 per cent  natural and additives-free.

Starting from Lagos, the  juice product without preservatives is being sold in major cities in the country. He said the  company would like to increase its reach to consumers in other states.

To achieve this, he said the company is working hard to implement last-mile distribution models that bring juice to  the doorsteps of consumers at an affordable price.

He said he gets his raw materials from the company’s farms and other partner farmers and  keeps everything local from bottles to labels.

The produce, fresh from the farm field, is taken to the factory where it is first inspected and sorted. The workers wash the fruits and vegetables with a bubble washer to get rid of impurities.

After washing, produce is disinfected to kill harmful bacteria, germs and parasites then they spin out the water left on the produce from washing and disinfecting using a high speed centrifuge. When fruits and vegetable are completely dried, it goes through the cold pressed machine which extracts the juice from fruit and vegetable in the absence of heat, retaining almost all the nutrients found in the whole fruits and vegetables without the fibre.

After extraction, a three-mesh filter is used to make sure that all the pulp and fibre before bottling are removed and rapidly cooled to four degree celsius to stop the growth of any bacteria.

With the market growing at a healthy rate and with changing lifestyles and rising levels of health consciousness among consumers, the demand for healthier  natural products such  packaged fruit juice is only going to increase in times to come.

According to him, Nigerians are aware of the importance of healthy, high-quality foods.

So far, his business has grown through  enthusiasm and determination, and he has increased the number of his employees.

In addition to large farms, providing him 60 per cent of the raw materials, Ladoja has built a processing facility.

Ladoja said price is a challenge because of the high cost of packaging fresh juice in a manner that can compete with foreign brands.

But he didn’t cut his entrepreneurial teeth from the food industry.

He runs two different firms – Real Livestock, a company which focuses on the commercial cultivation of grains and meat production and Simply Green Limited, which owns a farm and produces four flavours of Simply Green Juices.

Credit: Daniel Essiet