Toyin Onigbanjo Turned a Kitchen Hobby Into the August Secrets Child Nutrition Brand

Oluwatoyin Onigbanjo, a former reporter with the News Agency of Nigeria, founded August Secrets, a Nigerian child nutrition company whose African-inspired cereals are listed in company profiles as stocked in more than 300 stores across Nigeria, Ghana and Canada.

The business grew out of a domestic problem. Onigbanjo has said she bought three full bags of jar purees for her infant son, who refused to eat them until she prepared local foods such as ground rice with carrots. She concluded that many mothers faced the same difficulty finding suitable complementary foods, and that conclusion became the founding idea of the brand.

The first public marker of her work came in May 2016, when she placed in the Samsung Food Art Competition. By her own account, the skill of arranging food attractively for her son carried straight into her recipes and later her book. She started a food blog aimed at making children's meals fun, simple and healthy, and by 2019 she told an interviewer the venture had been running for three years, two of them officially.

At that point she was still new to full-time entrepreneurship. Her career had begun in teaching and freelance writing before she joined the News Agency of Nigeria, where she worked for six years writing features, news and audio stories. She resigned to run August Secrets, having taken courses in child nutrition shortly before the move. "Some people also hardly believe my company started as a hobby and I never believed I could leave my job for it," she said in 2019.

Her academic background is in English and Literature, followed by a master's degree in International Affairs from the University of Lagos. She has also completed a programme at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business (Seed) and certification in child nutrition.

Recognition followed quickly. In 2018 she was named among Ynaija's Most Inspiring Women and received the Her Network Woman of the Year award. In the same year August Secrets won the Food Safety Award from Royal DSM International, and she took part in a panel in Thailand on accelerating the second Sustainable Development Goal of ending hunger and malnutrition. She later appeared on the Power Woman Africa List in 2021 and the Leading Ladies Africa Most Inspiring Women list in 2022. SME100 has also named her one of Nigeria's most innovative women entrepreneurs.

Her best-known honour is the Graca Machel Gender Lens Award, which she received for her work on child nutrition and women's empowerment in West Africa through the GAIN Alliance Nutripitch Programme. She has also published a paper on curbing child malnutrition using traditional recipes and foods.

The product line is built on local ingredients. Jaden's Natural Cereals, named for her son, is the company's flagship. Onigbanjo is also the author of the August Secrets Meal Plan, a recipe book containing more than 50 recipes and three rotatable meal plans drawn from everyday Nigerian and African foodstuffs. She has said the recipes are short and colourful because most mothers are too busy to read long instructions.

Her case for the business rests on what she sees as a gap in children's diets. Citing research done with crèche and school owners, she said many mothers pack only noodles, spaghetti and plantain for a child all week, which in her estimate leaves the child short of more than 30 percent of major nutrients such as protein. "Truthfully, this is not totally their fault, it is just more ideas that we need," she said.

In recent years the company has widened its aim. "I started the AugustSecrets brand whilst trying to find food options for my son. Today, we have fed thousands of young children with homemade-style cereals and snacks, all with African food ingredients. The goal is to make African food a priority and not an afterthought, reducing the scourge of nutritional deficiencies especially in young children. Everyone knows AugustSecrets as a brand for babies, but our mission has grown beyond that to a family-focused brand," she said.

She describes the work as demanding. "It is not easy at all. I have cried many times to sleep," she has said, adding that what keeps her going is seeing mothers use her recipes and their children eating better. The company has also held seminars for rural women on nutrition, and she has named raising funds to take food to children in camps for internally displaced people as a short-term goal.

Her stated principle is simple. "Do all you can to use your God-given talents to affect the world positively. Life is short," she said.