Her Mother's Diabetes Sent Her Back to an Old Grain

When Grace Akatuha's mother was diagnosed with diabetes, Grace started looking hard at what her mother could safely eat. Low-sugar foods were on the list, and one of them was a grain Ugandans have eaten for generations: millet.

That search became Kikazi, a flour brand now on supermarket shelves across Uganda and on an online shop in the United Kingdom.

A daughter from the west

Grace comes from western Uganda. In 2019 she started Kikazi with five million shillings from her savings and help from her family.

At first it was a business in name only. There was no registration, no records, no team and no fixed address. "I was totally green. My business had no structure," she later told Business Focus.

What she did have was a clear idea of who the flour was for: people looking for healthier food, including those living with diabetes.

What is in the bag

Kikazi's main product is millet flour. Customers then asked for cassava flour, so she added that too.

The grain comes from smallholder farms in western Uganda, near where she grew up. It travels to Kampala to be ground on modern milling machines, then goes to her premises in Namugongo, just outside the capital.

Clean flour starts on the farm. Kikazi shows its farmers how to look after the harvest so that dirt stays out of it. The grain is then checked for how dry it is and how even its size is. Both flours carry the Q mark of the Uganda National Bureau of Standards.

For a buyer, that means a staple food from an old African grain, packed in Uganda by the woman who built the supply chain behind it.

Building it properly

The turning point was learning to run a company, not just sell flour.

With support from dfcu's Rising Woman Initiative, the business grew up: proper records, a physical address and an accountant. In 2023 she incorporated Kikazi Agri Products Limited. The same year the Youth Start Up Academy of Uganda gave her five million shillings, and she reports that sales rose by a fifth after the programme.

In 2024 a 20,000 dollar award from the NSSF Hi-Innovator programme bought a tuk-tuk for deliveries.

Where Kikazi stands now

By late 2025 her flour was stocked in more than 200 supermarkets across Uganda. Most of it goes out wholesale, to supermarkets, pharmacies and hospital canteens. The rest goes to walk-in customers, online orders and small shops. She has five permanent staff and six casual workers.

The grain comes from more than 1,000 smallholder farmers. Four in ten are women and one in five is young, and most farm around two villages: Kashongi in Kiruhura District and Kasheshe in Rukungiri District.

Kikazi millet flour has already reached the UK and Dubai through other traders. One of them is visible online: the UK shop Owino Supermarket lists Kikazi Original Millet Flour. Kikazi has also registered two trademarks. In September 2026 Grace won a bronze medal in the My IP Story competition, run by the secretariat of Africa's free trade area.

How to buy

• In Uganda: supermarkets and pharmacies that stock Kikazi, or from Kikazi Agri Products directly.
• In the UK: a London-area shop, Owino Supermarket, stocks Kikazi millet flour.

What's next

Grace wants to sell across borders herself, starting with Kenya and Burundi.

She knows the hurdles. Freight is the big one: with a few boxes at a time, getting flour to a neighbouring country can cost more than milling it. Shelves abroad can take most of a year to refill. Paperwork does not travel well either, since the Ugandan quality mark is not enough in every country. As of late 2025 she was working towards ISO certification to make export easier.

Her reason for pushing on goes back to the grain itself. "We believe that feeding the future begins with preserving the nutritional wisdom of our past," she says.

Key Takeaways

Kikazi shows how a family worry can grow into a food brand when the business behind it is built with care.

• Quality starts before the mill. Teaching farmers to dry grain off the ground and checking every batch is what lets a small brand earn a national quality mark.
• Structure opens doors. Records, a registered company and trademarks came before the supermarket deals, the awards and the first steps abroad.