Affiong Williams

When Affiong Williams claimed the 2024 WAYA Grand Prize, she already had a decade of building Nigeria’s most recognized healthy snack brand behind her. What the award unleashed was something else, a year of acceleration that reads less like incremental progress and more like a company finding its full stride.

ReelFruit, formally Nature’s Bounty Health Products Ltd, processes tropical fruits into premium snacks and when Affiong won the Grand Prize, the business employed 268 people and was fighting its way back from a loss year in 2023. Twelve months later, the numbers told a different story.

FY2024 closed with revenue up 133% on the prior year and the company turned profitable again after a difficult 2023. By mid-2025, that momentum had compounded further, first-half revenues had already surpassed the entire prior year’s total. 

The export story is particularly striking. ReelFruit broke into the US market in the period following the award, growing export revenues by over 200% year-on-year. New international customers in the Netherlands, Canada, the UK and South Africa followed. Affiong has since been shortlisted by Afreximbank to speak at the International Africa Trade Fair on the experience of exporting Nigerian products to the US and Europe, recognition that her export journey carries lessons the continent needs to hear.

Some of the most significant innovations since the award have been about turning what gets thrown away into something valuable. ReelFruit installed a mango pulping machine that now recovers over 200MT of overripe mangoes annually, fruit that would have been discarded and converts it into mango pulp for juice and yogurt manufacturers. The company also launched a waste-to-wealth initiative converting coconut byproducts into coconut oil and water, targeting the local beauty industry with a goal of transforming 5,000MT of coconut waste into 1,000MT of oil. This initiative has been shortlisted for a €200,000 matching grant through the Luxaid Challenge Fund. Meanwhile, expanded cold storage capacity is allowing the business to rescue an additional 5,000MT of fruit from post-harvest loss annually. The company also launched Nigeria’s first desiccated coconut processing line, a first for the country, alongside a long-term contract with a European client that will ensure consistent year-round factory utilization and positions ReelFruit toward its goal of becoming a contract manufacturing partner.

Total staff grew from 268 at the time of the award to 360 a year later, 80 new jobs, the majority on the processing floor. In the same year, women made up over 65% of the total workforce, with 220 women employed, up from 156. Youth employment also grew from 182 to 255. The company also completed a full-team training program on food safety and quality management, culminating in successful FSSC 22000 GFSI certification, a significant milestone that strengthened ReelFruit’s competitiveness in international markets and reflected how the whole organization had matured.

Beyond the factory gates, ReelFruit trained and hired over 100 youth at its Abeokuta plant through a workplace readiness programme. It launched a demonstration farm as a hands-on training site for smallholder farmers, training over 500 farmers in its sourcing network on agronomic practices, quality inputs and climate-smart techniques. It also partnered with IDH Sustainable Trade on a $140,000 backward integration project, a 50-hectare mixed crop farm with the Ogun State Government, designed to draw 200 young people into profitable tree crop farming. The long-term vision extends to a 400-hectare block farm growing mango, coconut, and pineapple, with a goal of introducing 3,000 young people, especially women, to regenerative agriculture.

The WAYA Grand Prize was not the end of Affiong’s recognition cycle, it seemed to have opened it. She was named in the Access Bank Power of 100 Award, honoring exceptional women across 16 African countries. She was invited to speak at BusinessDay’s Annual Business Conference on navigating Nigeria’s agribusiness industry as a CEO. Her story has been covered in BusinessDay’s editorial pages. Each platform extends ReelFruit’s reach and amplifies Affiong’s ability to mentor and advise other women agripreneurs, something she continues to do actively on growth, fundraising and market expansion.

Affiong’s journey since WAYA is a window into what recognition at the right moment can do for a woman-led agribusiness. The award did not create ReelFruit’s trajectory, it validated and amplified one that was already building. The business entered the award cycle recovering from a difficult year. It exited the first year post-award with a certified factory, a US export revenue line, new product categories, a growing and majority-women workforce and a pipeline of partnerships that reach from Abeokuta’s farming communities to supermarket shelves in Europe and North America. That is what the WAYA Grand Prize looks like when it lands with a founder ready to use it.