In 2012, most Rwandan families ate meat once a week at best — and only if a celebration justified the cost.

Beef production was declining. Cold-chain infrastructure was virtually non-existent. The gap between a farmer raising livestock and a family eating affordable protein was filled by informal traders, inconsistent supply, and no temperature control between farm and table.

For processors trying to build a formal meat business, the inputs were just as broken as the outputs. Third-party livestock suppliers were unreliable. Quality was unpredictable. And moving finished product into Kigali meant trusting trucks that could not guarantee the cold chain held.

The price of protein stayed high. Not because demand was low — but because the supply chain had never been built.

Rwanda’s meat supply chain needed someone willing to build every part of it.

Herve Tuyishime launched Paniel Meat Processing in 2012 with pork sausages and no formal background in livestock. What he built over the next fourteen years was not a processing business that got lucky — it was a vertically integrated supply chain assembled one broken link at a time.

When third-party suppliers proved inconsistent, he launched Livestock Bank — partnering directly with farmers, supplying improved breeds, veterinary care, and feed, then buying back mature animals to supply his own processing lines.

When cold-chain logistics failed him, he built an internal refrigerated fleet. That fleet became Truck Rwanda, now a regional cold-chain provider serving cooperatives, hotels, and food producers across East Africa.

When consumer demand shifted to poultry and the infrastructure required long-term capital, Paniel listed on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius under the ticker ELIT — securing the patient equity needed to build breeder farms, hatcheries, slaughterhouses, and a feed mill.

Today Paniel is Rwanda’s second-largest poultry producer. It did not get there by scaling one product. It got there by refusing to leave the supply chain to someone else.

Paniel’s vertical stack now covers every link in the chain.

Livestock Bank sources from farmers upstream, providing breeds, feed, and veterinary support, and guarantees a steady supply of animals back to the processing lines. An internal feed plant controls the input that drives 75% of chicken production cost. Hatcheries supply day-old chicks. Processing units and abattoirs convert broilers and livestock into packaged product. Truck Rwanda’s refrigerated fleet moves it safely to market. A wholesale network handles distribution at scale — over 200 tonnes of chicken monthly.

Targeting a batch capacity of 120,000 broilers as its new infrastructure comes fully online, Paniel is not finished building.

The question Herve has been answering since 2012 is still the same one: how do you lower the price of meat by 100 Rwandan francs? Every entity in the stack exists because the answer required it.

That is the kind of founder Africa Eats backs — and holds.