Paarl

We've built a wonderful team.

My colleague, Russell Lamberti, here, who's actually grown up in KwaZulu-Natal for much of his life, is, is heading our Paarl Stellenbosch office.

It's a great team.

Uh, we, we're getting very good success in court, and we plan to expand that.

He, he understands a lot of that.

He's also in contact with the members of this network and so is able to point questions to other, uh, entities.

You know, someone's tried this in Frankfort, others have tried this in Lichtenburg, someone's trying this in the Paarl, others have tried this in, in here and there, and learning from each other.

Christo is, is coordinating some of that.

We're talking about what it means to follow Jesus.

Do you know that following Jesus looks like something? Yesterday, we were driving to Paarl, and on the N1, there's this huge billboard for a fast food company, and the tagline across the whole billboard was, "Feed your obsession." Huh.

Can you imagine how I felt? [laughs] Why I'm saying this is because whether you like it or not, friends, we are all being formed by something.

Yeah.

You need to, you know, remove yourself from your day-to-day, which wasn't completely, uh, possible for me, so I had to go back once a week.

But remove yourself from that environment, so I was living in Paarl, and our head office was in Paarl at that stage.

So I ended up renting a house here in Honrus, close, just around the corner from where we're sitting now, and ended up buying a house later there as a result of that.

And, um, so remove yourself from that, remove, I even removed myself from, from sort of the day-to-day of my family.

So they lived in Paarl, they joined me over weekends.

But it, you know, so I then had time on my, on my own to sort of really reflect.

That was the, how it was designed.

He was roasting macadamia nuts from his family farm in Mpumalanga and selling nut butter at Western Cape markets.

Today, he operates from a state-of-the-art facility in Paarl.

He's got PSG on board as a big investor, and he's making more than just macadamia nut butter.

There're plant-based milks, there're different nut butters, there's yogurt, there're rusks, and it's all from a bootstrap beginning into a proper business.

Um, we were able to, from res, you know, move into a little pack shed in Worcester.

It was my business partner's family farm.

We then had an opportunity in Cape Town, eventually settled in, into Paarl with a little factory here that we then, for the first time, produced our own products.

In Cape Town, we were, were trialing the co-packing, uh, side of it.

Coldest place again, Sutherland tonight at zero degrees.

Stellenbosch, Paarl, uh, 26 odd degrees today.

Same conditions as Cape Town.

Uh, Worcester, a little bit of mist hanging around this morning, 23 degrees, and, uh, same for Beaufort West.

But you sucked at stand-up.

Do you remember your gig in Paarl?

My first one was the worst.

It's the one in Paarl, hey?

Potch.

Was it in Potch? Yes.