The story behind Koki

Koki started because of one very annoying question.

What can I cook today?

If you're Cameroonian, or honestly just African, you already know this question. People with food in the house and money in their pocket, all of them standing in their kitchens asking the same thing.

It sounds simple. It is simple. Yet I used to ask this question all the time. So I did what everyone does. I went online. Terrible idea.

I found recipes full of words I didn't recognize and ended up feeling like I had wandered into someone else's kitchen.

African cuisine is extraordinary, and not enough people know it. The recipes exist, the knowledge exists, but it is scattered, it is oral, it is disappearing quietly.

This app is one place to bring it all together, built by someone who genuinely just wanted to know what to cook for dinner.

I named Koki after one of my favorite Cameroonian dishes. Beans, palm oil, salt, wrapped in leaves and absolutely no drama. The kind of food that reminds you that the best things are usually the simplest ones.

The logo is the koki bean itself, swimming in orange. Why orange? Honestly, why not.

Right now it is just me building this. One person with an embarrassing amount of coffee.

And what keeps me going is that somewhere in the world right now, there is a whole generation of us slowly losing a language we did not even know we were speaking, a language made of spices and technique and memory passed through hands that cooked without measuring. Koki is a small, stubborn attempt to make sure that language does not disappear. To keep something alive that deserves to be alive.