Moniepoint Inc. has traced four decades of Nigeria’s food service industry, affirming that the sector’s most persistent payment problems, which include settlement delays, unreliable confirmation, unchecked theft and inaccessible credit have been resolved by real-time digital infrastructure, turning food commerce into an $11.09 billion market in 2025.
According to the report, the sector has undergone a massive structural shift marked by food-delivery super-apps, as well as a new generation of cloud kitchens operating without a single dining chair, with the food service industry poised to experience unprecedented growth as the Nigerian market is projected to reach $19.31 billion by 2030, growing at 11.73% annually.
The study traces the industry’s roots from the UAC-owned Kingsway Rendezvous of 1973 and the 1986 launch of Mr Bigg’s, through the rise of Chicken Republic and other quick-service chains, to the present day, where food and drinks form the second-largest merchant sector on Moniepoint’s platform, trailing only retail.
Group CEO of Moniepoint Inc., Tosin Eniolorunda, noted that “Moniepoint believes financial inclusion is not just about access. It’s about dignity, about enabling people to transact on their terms.
“What’s happening in the food service sector today is significant. The real competitive question today is how deeply that payment infrastructure is woven into the way the business actually runs day-to-day. Moniepoint is sitting right at the centre of that shift. We are ensuring that payments are connected to inventory, inventory to recipes, recipes to procurement, procurement to credit, and credit to growth plans.
“By building out tools like Moniebook and Orda that match the operational reality of these culinary entrepreneurs, who act as mini-factories converting perishable raw materials into time-sensitive output, we are providing the digital operating system that drives sustainable scale for Nigeria’s socio-economic development.”
The report finds that for most of that history, Nigerian food businesses ran almost entirely on cash, with multi-location operators managing cash across a dozen or more outlets, facing constant exposure to loss, theft and human error.
The rise of bank transfers in the 2010s introduced a new pain point around confirming that the payment had actually landed before releasing an order.
At peak hours, the study notes, this manual verification could add two to five minutes to every transaction, with digital infrastructure most likely to falter precisely when demand and stakes were highest, especially during Christmas, New Year’s and Eid celebrations.
The study also documents how disconnected payment and inventory systems enabled operational leakage that was structurally difficult to detect, from unaccounted stock in the kitchen to under-ringing at the till and how Nigeria’s collateral-based lending system routinely locked thriving food businesses out of credit.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) estimates that the country’s unmet MSME credit demand was $32.2 billion in 2022, a gap that falls disproportionately on women, who, the report shows, own 86.8% of businesses in the accommodation and food services sector, the most female-dominated sector in the Nigerian economy.