When Oluwatosin Abigael Ayodele moved to the UK three years ago, she already had a business skill she knew well: making hair.
Cooking, however, belonged to a different part of her life. It was something she did at home, for herself, her friends and family. She enjoyed it, but she had never considered it a business. Then her friends began to suggest otherwise.
Whenever Ayodele cooked for them, they would tell her the food was good enough to sell. At first, their comments were little more than encouragement. She already had hair to make and a life to build in a new country, so turning cooking into another source of work was not an immediate priority.
It took a birthday party to make the suggestion feel more practical.
Ayodele was asked to anchor a friend’s birthday celebration, where she also prepared the food. It gave her an opportunity to cook on a larger scale and, more importantly, to see how people responded to what she made outside the familiar setting of home and friendship.
The response was enough to make her reconsider the idea.
In April, she started Heart and Spice, a food business serving traditional Nigerian meals in the UK. What began as something her friends had repeatedly encouraged her to try has now become another business she is learning to build alongside her hair work.
The menu reflects the food she knows best. Ayodele focuses on traditional Nigerian meals rather than adapting the food to fit what she thinks a British market might expect. Most of her customers are Nigerians, and for them, the familiarity is part of the appeal.
There is something significant about that choice. For many Nigerians living abroad, food can be one of the simplest ways to remain connected to home. Ayodele’s approach is not to reinvent Nigerian cooking for a new audience, but to prepare the kind of meals that already feel familiar to her customers.
Heart and Spice also offers pastries, delivery and plating for customers ordering for events and special occasions. As the business grows, Ayodele hopes to introduce more African dishes, gradually expanding the menu without losing the Nigerian foundation on which the business was built.
For now, much of the work is still about learning the realities of running a food business. Cooking for friends is different from cooking for paying customers. There are orders to organise, meals to prepare, deliveries to coordinate and presentation to consider. Each order brings another opportunity to understand what customers want and how the business can improve.
It is a different kind of work from making hair, but Ayodele has not abandoned the business she started with. Instead, the two now exist alongside each other, giving her two different ways to earn from skills she has developed over time.
Running Heart and Spice has also introduced her to a different side of business. Cooking for friends came naturally; preparing food for paying customers comes with the added demands of taking orders, organising deliveries and making sure the food arrives as expected. Plating has become part of the service too, particularly for customers ordering for events.
The business is still in its early stages, and Ayodele is already thinking about how to expand it. Pastries are part of the current offering, while more African dishes are planned for the future. For now, however, Nigerian food remains at the centre of the menu and the business continues to grow around the customers who first encouraged her to sell it.
Three years after moving to the UK, Ayodele has found herself building something she never originally planned for. Hair remains part of her working life, but cooking has become another business of its own, one that began with meals shared among friends and grew when she finally decided to take their advice seriously.