The Yvette Tetteh Story — The Woman Turning Ghana's Fruit Surplus Into Global Currency

Founder, Pure and Just Food | CEO, Yvaya Farm

There is a particular kind of African founder who refuses to choose between conscience and commerce — who builds a company and a cause with the same hands. Yvette Tetteh is that founder. A Ghanaian-British entrepreneur and Stanford graduate, she co-founded Pure and Just Food in 2018 with Emmanuel Ampadu, building a company that does something deceptively simple and structurally radical: it takes Ghana's abundant, undervalued fruit harvest — mango, pineapple, pawpaw, banana — and turns it into a shelf-stable, export-grade dried fruit brand called Yvaya Farm.

**The Value-Gap Problem**

Ghana grows fruit in volumes that regularly exceed what local markets can absorb before spoilage sets in. That gap — between what farmers grow and what gets sold before it rots — is where value leaks out of African agriculture continent-wide. Tetteh built her business directly inside that gap, facilitating rural-urban trade that links farm produce to local and foreign retail opportunities. It is not a charity framing. It is a supply chain correction, built as a company.

The numbers are the proof of concept. The circular, climate-smart model behind Yvaya Farm lifts farmer income by roughly 40 percent while cutting spoilage and post-harvest losses by about half on average. That is the entire thesis of value-added trade in one sentence — fewer losses at the farm gate, more income for the grower, more shelf life for the product, more margin captured on African soil before a single container leaves the port.

**Built for Export, Rooted in Community**

Pure and Just Food did not stay a local snack brand. Yvaya Farm products now move through more than 25 retail points and three e-commerce platforms in Ghana, and have reached export markets including Germany, the UAE, Japan, and the United States. That is a genuine agri-CPG export footprint — precisely the kind of finished, branded, value-added African product that so rarely makes it past the border as anything more than a raw commodity.

The model is also explicitly built to be youth-and-women-forward. The company has created twenty direct jobs since inception, and pays part-time staff well above Ghana's official minimum wage, with full-time management earning nearly triple it. Tetteh's operating philosophy treats fair wages as strategy, not sentiment — a company that pays above minimum wage builds retention, skill, and loyalty into its supply chain, which in agro-processing is the difference between a brand that scales and one that churns through labour every season.

Her recent work has pushed this further upstream into raw material sourcing. In sourcing shea, Pure and Just's partner network runs direct relationships with women-led shea nut communities — gathering women leads from more than 40 communities annually to review performance, strengthen traceability, and rebuild trust season over season. That is the unglamorous, essential architecture of ethical sourcing: not a certification logo, but a standing relationship with the women who are the backbone of the value chain.

**Beyond the Business: The Volta River**

What sets Tetteh apart in the founder landscape is that her commitment to Ghana's natural resource base is not confined to her balance sheet. In 2023, she partnered with The Or Foundation on the Agbetsi Living Water Expedition, swimming the length of the Volta River — Ghana's most important inland waterway — to document the impact of textile microfibre pollution and press for stronger extended producer responsibility policy on secondhand clothing waste. She covered roughly 450 kilometres, becoming the first person on record to swim the full length of the river, living aboard a solar-powered research vessel built in Ghana.

It is worth sitting with what that expedition represents alongside her agribusiness: a founder who understands that food security and river health are the same fight. The Volta is not incidental to Ghanaian agriculture — it is irrigation, transport, and livelihood for the very farming communities Pure and Just sources from. Protecting it is supply chain protection.

**The Takeaway for Africa's Agribusiness Builders**

Yvette Tetteh's story is a working model of what indigenous crop revival and value-added trade look like when built by someone who refuses to separate commercial rigor from community accountability. She did not wait for a multinational to solve Ghana's post-harvest loss problem. She built the correction herself — a company that pays farmers more, wastes less, employs young Ghanaians at above-market wages, and gets Ghanaian fruit onto shelves in Berlin, Dubai, Tokyo, and New York under a Ghanaian brand name.

That is what food sovereignty looks like in practice: not a slogan, but a dried mango pouch on a shelf overseas, still carrying the name Yvaya.

*Africa One Brand: Profiling the founders building the value chains, brands, and institutions of Africa's agribusiness future.*