RAINBOW
PEANUT BUTTER ON
THE MARKET
By Ashley Rukudzo Kavumbura| VarsityNews | Award winning 22-year-old entrepreneur
Valentine Shoti (Mai Dovi), from the capital, has
stunned the public market with unique and
wonderful peanut butter product that has various
flavours which she discovered in form 2 during
her tenure at Zengeza High School.
Growing with no parents put Mai Dovi in difficult
times as she had to cater and finance for her
younger sisters’ education and at the same time
advancing with hers. She says she had to put self-
pity aside and became strong for her sisters’ sake.
However, she managed to pull through up to O’
level. In 2019, she turned her invention and
innovation into a business and registered her
company by the name ORGANUT private limited.
‘Mai Dovi’ followed through from her line of
business which she showed expertise. ORGANUT
manufactures herbal and flavoured peanut butter, and she says she formulated these formulas when she was a form 2 student at a Chitungwiza local school where she got recognized and got published in The Herald as; “teen who broke the odds in the
food industry”.
The product has quite a variety which ranges from mint, ginger, cinnamon, moringa,
mufandichimuka, garlic, fenugreek, vanilla among other great flavours and medicinal herbs. Mai Dovi talks about how people are suffering from ailments and other deficiencies due to lack of some of these herbs, which people shun away from because of their raw bitter taste. She says it then brought an idea to incorporate these herbs in a food product that might be consumed on a regular basis, and help curb these ailments. She envisions herself transforming Zimbabwe by bringing more health reformative formulas, as she believes that what people eat determines their lifespan.
Her recognition is widening bit by bit. She once
received an award of 5000usd worth of Amazon
and Google credits from Founders Live, after
pitching her business, to help expand her business Mai Dovi Valentine Shoti, Founder and CEO of Organut online. She has also received special recognition and support from various institutions across the nation such as Youth
Empowerment and Transformation Trust (YETT), Youth Connect Zimbabwe, Research Council Zimbabwe through the International Youth Symposium, UNDP, CBZ Youth Entrepreneurship Program, Impact Hub, Daughters of Virtue
(DOV) and last but not least from the Ministry of Women Affairs Zimbabwe.
Who knew peanut butter would be such an interesting product? For ages it has been the same taste from the same recipe passed down from the ancestors, and today an innovation has come
upon it from a tender young lady who aspires to make it better. Maybe in the future, the foods that we run away from today, we will be running after them some day.