Olasunkanmi Owoyemi: Redefining the Cocoa Trade and Nigerian Agriculture Business

RaheemAkingbolu.

Long before the headlines, and the $700 million valuation or the rows of export-ready cocoa beans lined up for inspection, there was a silence. The kind that makes a man question his place in a system he thought he understood. In that silence, farmers waited; not for the rain, or the harvest, but for payment that never came. Their cocoa had been collected, weighed, and shipped. But days passed. Then weeks. The exporter who had promised swift settlement was nowhere to be found.

Caught in the middle was Olasunkanmi Owoyemi, barely in his twenties, standing on the shoulders of men who had trusted his word. It was not the first delayed payment they had endured. But this one felt different. There were no excuses left. No calls returned. No funds in transit. Just the heavy, familiar quiet of disappointment that generations of smallholder farmers in Nigeria understand all too well.

That moment did not break him. It shaped him.

What Owoyemi understood in that silence was not just the fragility of the cocoa trade. It was the absence of structure, the absence of a functioning system. Rather than turn away, he began to build one. Today, that decision has grown into Sunbeth’s agribusiness institution, with operations spanning commodity aggregation, processing, logistics, and export.

When Owoyemi founded the company in 2017, he started with a ₦500 million bank guarantee and a mandate to trade. The model was simple: buy cocoa at scale, meet export quotas, move fast. While competitors raced towards volume, Owoyemi invested in structure, documentation, risk controls, and internal standards that banks noticed and farmers respected.

Having grown up learning business under the watchful mentorship of his father at Sunny Owo Ventures, he had absorbed the importance of structure early. By the time he secured his first export loan from Fidelity Bank Plc, he was laying the foundation for what would become a reputable model.

Within five years, Sunbeth had evolved beyond a trading outfit. Processing came next, not as an expansion, but as a form of control. Cocoa quality fluctuates wildly when handled by too many hands. By investing in processing, Sunbeth could standardise output, reduce post-harvest losses, and comply with the increasingly complex specifications of international buyers. Logistics followed, creating Sunbeth Shipping — not just a service provider, but an in-house engine ensuring reliability and speed across the value chain.

By 2023, Sunbeth was exporting over 150,000 metric tonnes of cocoa, commanding more than 15% of Nigeria’s export market. Its sourcing capacity today stands at 45,000MT, spread across Nigeria and an expanding footprint in Cameroon. But scale brought a new kind of visibility, and with it, a deeper sense of responsibility. The numbers were growing, but the farmers were not. Productivity at the base of the chain remained stagnant. Input access was still sporadic. Most farmers still planted with guesswork and borrowed with fear. Growth, for them, was still a gamble.

For Owoyemi, structure has always meant more than balance sheets. It is dignity, the ability for a farmer to sell his beans today, and know that payment will arrive tomorrow. It is confidence, and the assurance that inputs, credit, and knowledge are within reach, not left to chance. And it is continuity that the next generation of farmers will inherit a system, not a struggle.

Today, Sunbeth’s closed-loop ecosystem is designed with that in mind. From Sunbeth Shipping’s logistics reliability to SFI Agri’s global reach and Sunbeth Cameroon’s expansion, each piece is built to serve not just global buyers, but the smallholder at origin who must see the benefit first.

Because the truth is, agriculture’s primary problem in Nigeria has never been effort; farmers have always toiled. It has been structured (or the lack thereof). And if Sunbeth succeeds, it won’t only transform the cocoa industry or farming ecosystem, it will mean that the silence that once haunted villages at harvest time is replaced with something much grandeur: the sound of certainty. The progress and dignity returned to the people who feed the system.