In 2023, Amoke Odukoya, the founder of Amoke Oge, revealed that she started her amala restaurant business with less than N200,000. Two years later, the food delivery platform Chowdeck announced that the business had reached N2.3 billion in revenue, supported by over 500,000 deliveries completed in just three years.
This milestone makes Amoke Oge the first female-led food business on Chowdeck to reach half a million deliveries.
Humble Beginnings in Araromi
In a 2023 interview with City People Magazine, Amoke Oke, who had just opened a new branch in Oshodi, revealed that she learned how to cook from her mother, a food vendor in Araromi, Oyo State. In 1999, she further honed her skills under her elder sister, Saudi Alamala, a popular food vendor in Bariga, Lagos.
“I learnt more from her before I started mine 7 years ago,” she said. She started out by cooking at parties and social events before opening her first shop at Bawala in Pedro, Lagos. “I didn’t open the shop to make money. I just wanted to cook. I enjoy it, and even today, I still cook despite being the boss,” she said.
Slow Start
After opening her first branch in 2015, it took three years before she could expand. But between 2018 and 2023, Odukoya opened five more locations, growing to seven branches in seven years. She now has an additional store in Ikoyi. She credits her sisters, Saudi Alamala and Ashabi Alamala, for mentoring her along the way.
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Despite a steady rise, Amoke Oge’s growth exploded after she joined food platforms like Glovo and Chowdeck. She was one of the first 100 vendors to join Chowdeck, which was just entering the food delivery space.
While noting that the delivery app won’t be where it is without vendors like Amoke Oge, Femi Aluko, chief executive officer and co-founder of Chowdeck, said, “Amoke was one of our first 100 restaurants, and this is great news for us.”
Chowdeck’s Rise
Chowdeck launched in 2021 to tap Nigeria’s $834.7 million food delivery industry, which was dominated by giants such as Bolt, Glovo, and Jumia at the time. According to reports, eating at restaurants and other food vendors constitutes about 20 percent of household spending in Nigeria.
Since then, it has expanded to eight cities, including Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan, Port Harcourt, Ilorin, Benin City, Abeokuta, and Asaba.
In 2023, it crossed N1 billion in monthly gross merchandise value (GMV). By October 2024, it had processed over N30 billion in total deliveries and surpassed 1 million registered users, up from just 319 users in its first month.
Today, it has become the platform of choice for many restaurants, including an exclusive deal with Chicken Republic.
Describing her pre-Chowdeck days, Amoke Oge highlighted jam-packed stores, endless queues, frustrated customers and overwhelmed staff. However, she noted that this changed after joining Chowdeck, with foot traffic to her store decreasing, while her revenues increased.
This aligns with Jean Tirole, who won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, theory that platforms exist to connect two groups, typically buyers and sellers, through an intermediary that creates more value than if the groups interacted directly.
While Chowdeck managed orders, deliveries, and customers, Amoke Oge concentrated on cooking for customers she might never have reached if restricted to physical stores.
Amoke Oge is not the only business thriving through Chowdeck. On May 13, 2025, the platform revealed that Korede Spaghetti, a vendor based at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), had processed N1 billion worth of food orders on Chowdeck.
Korede credited the platform with solving “80 percent of its logistics challenges,” enabling it to scale beyond campus walls to a broader customer base.
