Rwanda’s food economy was growing. Its cold chain was not. Moving temperature-sensitive food ( meat, dairy, produce)reliably between farms, processors, and buyers required refrigerated transport that most logistics providers didn’t have, and couldn’t guarantee even when they claimed to. For a food company like Paniel Meat Processing, which had built Rwanda’s most disciplined meat supply chain, the last-mile logistics problem was the one it couldn’t outsource.

Across East Africa, the gap was the same: professional, scalable cold-chain logistics was infrastructure that barely existed at the commercial level.

When the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 left Paniel Meat Processing with an internal fleet running at a fraction of its capacity, Herve Tuyishime did not park the trucks. He turned them into a business.

Paniel Transport & Logistics spun out to serve the broader market food companies, cooperatives, hotels, processors  that needed cold-chain logistics it couldn’t build for itself. Africa Eats invested in the spin-off and gave it a new name: TRUK, the brand built to scale across East Africa.

In the first 18 months, TRUK served over 100 customers. The company grew to $2.2 million in revenues after the Africa Eats investment, then past $10 million in annualized revenues by mid-2025. The investment that kept truck

TRUK provides trucking, cold storage, and logistics services to food and agriculture businesses across Rwanda and Eastern Africa. It does what most logistics companies cannot: guarantee the cold chain holds, from pickup to delivery. Its clients include processors, cooperatives, hotels, and food producers who need temperature-controlled distribution without building the infrastructure themselves.

What started as excess capacity inside one company has become shared infrastructure for an industry.