Vivian Ngwodo is Changing the Way You Find Food

Tech entrepreneur, Vivian Ngwodo launched the UK’s first App dedicated to African and Caribbean Food. If you’ve ever searched for your ethnic food abroad, you’ll understand why this is much needed.

I lived abroad for a few years and one of the most frustrating things was trying to find Nigerian food in an Asian country. There were restaurants that served African food, but they were just so hard to find. An app that showed me where all the African restaurants were would have come in very handy, particularly when I was pregnant and craving plantain.

 

Vivian Ngwodo, seeing solutions

Vivian Ngwodo suffered the same problem when she relocated to the UK in 2012 to begin a new job. Living in London, she thought that getting access to Nigerian or African food would be a piece of cake, after all the African population in London is huge. It didn’t take her long to discover how mistaken she was. Even though she quickly adapted to British and Asian foods which were readily available, once in a while, she craved Nigerian food and wanted to introduce her friends to it as well.

 

She found the African food eventually, but she realized that she was not the only person who had trouble locating African or Caribbean food; these restaurants had little or no visibility, so she decided to do something about it.

 

The Journey…

In 2014, Vivian Ngwodo launched a restaurant blog and a super directory where she reviewed and listed African and Caribbean restaurants and food business from across London. Not too long after that, there was a sudden rise in African Supper Clubs in London and Londoners couldn’t wait to try the exotic and diverse flavours from the African continent.

Vivian didn’t stop there. This dynamic woman took an internship at a digital media agency and began developing Chopstreets, an app to make it easier for people to find and review Afro-Caribbean food all over the UK.

Chopstreets is the first of its kind in the UK dedicated to Afro-Caribbean food that finds and curates the best African and Caribbean restaurants, takeaways, pop-ups and supper clubs. With the social networking feature, users can eat their way around the African continent and taste the delicacies of The Caribbean. Now people can instantly see African and Caribbean food recommended by their friends and contacts and event share their own dining experiences.

 

What inspired Chopstreets?

Speaking about her inspiration, Vivian Ngwodo said, 

‘African and Caribbean cuisines have been under-represented for far too long and I am on a mission to make them famous by using technology to provide a platform for people to discover Afro-Caribbean cuisine easily and also set a standard for the Afro-Caribbean food industry in the U.K. My vision for Chopstreets is that it becomes an active social network for both African and Non-Africans as I believe eating is a social activity and the best friendships are made over food.’

 

We are super excited about this new app and I definitely could have used such a nifty tool years back when I had to go through my pregnancy without Dodo (fried plantain) 🙂

 

Download the app to find the best Afro-Caribbean food today.