Tanzania has the second-largest cattle population in Africa. It spends over $300 million annually importing 22 million liters of milk.

The gap between those two facts is an infrastructure problem. Tanzania’s smallholder dairy farmers produce milk that has nowhere formal to go — no reliable buyer, no pasteurization, no cold chain. Much of it never makes it to a consumer. What does reach the market is informal, inconsistent, and often unsafe.

Rogathe Dairy started with 350 liters of raw milk processed daily. It ended the Fledge accelerator with 3,500. The ten-fold increase in processing capacity came from one thing: proving the model worked.

The bizi collects directly from over 1,500 smallholder dairy farmers across Tanzania’s coastal region, pasteurizes and fortifies the milk with vitamins and minerals, and supplies in bulk to the institutions that serve the most nutritionally vulnerable: schools, hospitals, bakeries, and restaurants. Its customers collectively serve more than 10 million people daily in Dar es Salaam and the coast.

It appeared on Tanzania’s Shark Tank equivalent, Nipe Dili — a detail that says something about how Tanzania’s private sector has noticed what this company built.

Rogathe Dairy aggregates milk from over 1,500 smallholder dairy farmers across Tanzania, pasteurizes and fortifies it at its processing facility, and distributes in bulk to institutional buyers — schools, hospitals, and food service providers — across Dar es Salaam and the coastal region.

It provides extension services and veterinary support to its farmer network, and processes milk into mtindi (drinkable yogurt) alongside its bulk dairy products.