This campaign is raising R35 000

Campaign detail

Hi everyone,

My name is Tshidi Tau, and I am the founder of BeMerry. I started this journey back in 2011, officially registering the business in 2015, with a clear mission: to bring a healthy, nutritious, and uniquely African staple to our community.

At BeMerry, we manufacture mageu, but with a game-changing twist. Traditional mageu takes over three days to ferment. Our innovative process allows us to prepare it in just a single day, completely unfermented. Instead of relying on traditional fermentation for that signature sour taste, we use the incredible African baobab fruit. Baobab is an indigenous superfood and medicinal plant, making our mageu highly nutritious, healthy, and packed with healing benefits. Because we believe in the value of what we’ve built, our recipes for both our mageu and our instant porridge are fully IP-protected and trademarked.

Growing Within and With the Community

This business belongs to the kasi. Our primary home is right here in the spaza shops of Soweto. Our community has shown us immense love, and our 500ml sorghum mageu is flying off the shelves so fast that we constantly struggle to keep up with demand!

But to grow within the community, we need to grow with the community. Right now, our biggest bottlenecks are simple operational costs: we constantly run short of the popular 500ml bottles and their labels. Furthermore, true growth means creating local opportunities. Finance has been a heavy challenge, making it difficult to pay the people who help me or even sustain myself—in fact, my last official salary was back in 2015.

By supporting this campaign, you aren't just funding a product; you are fueling a local ecosystem.

How Your Support Will Help

We are raising R35,000 to take BeMerry to the next level. This funding will go directly toward:

• Inventory & Materials: Purchasing the raw ingredients, 500ml bottles, and stickers needed to keep local spaza shops fully stocked and satisfy our customers.

• Local Job Creation: Hiring and paying stipends for two casual workers from the community to assist with production.

• Founder Sustainability: Allowing me to draw a small wage to keep pouring 100% into this business.

When you back BeMerry, you are helping an innovative kasi business scale up, feed the neighbourhood with healthy superfoods, and put money back into local pockets.

Let’s build our community together. Thank you so much for your support!