Migoreng Millionaires

Tenacious,  persevering, influential and prosperous, while all these words are surprisingly apt in describing celebrities like Pablo Escobar, they serve a fantastic purpose in highlighting  the essence of another IE on campus. The owners of which are two are business (wo)men who have been consistent  beyond feasible comprehension. They have delivered diligently in the hungriest nights of ALA and have single handedly monopolized food at ALA, maximising ALA GDP and its reliance on the Indomie firms stock production. 

They are the Snackshack

The beginning of Snackshack is honestly admirable. Coming from a background with absolutely no prior business experience, Mohamed Ali took the bold and at the time seemingly unremarkable step to partner with Afomachukwu Ikeyi to create Snackshack. Yet the seemingly spontaneous choice does demand further inspection as to why the partnership was even formed.

As it turns out snackshack was originally created to fund another proposed IE aimed at increasing outings at ALA, which due to unfortunate friction with the Residential Life department, could not materialize into something tangible, leaving the pair only with their side hustle to work with..But why even try fund an alternative IE with a food service?

In fact, Mohamed Ali noticed a recurring trend on campus. In specific periods of the exhaustive ALA terms, desperate texts of “Who’s  selling Indomie?” (mostly coming from Mashour) went unanswered. This gap marked the beginning of yet another entrepreneurial journey whose impact Khaya’s roundtables could only dream of.

Yet many wonder why snackshack specifically was so surprisingly successful amidst several food sellers on campus. Upon further inquiry, we found out that the secret was…. just being consistent. Restocking with your own money if you have to and creating tracking systems to estimate how long inventory will last. It also helped that Mohamed Ali was generally always associated with food, spending several hours as ‘snackmaster’ and utilizing literally (by literally I genuinely mean it) every opportunity to market his continuously growing product.

But as the saying goes, the successful cat does not eat a pregnant rat. The success of Snackshack was greatly influenced by its ability to evade and manoeuvre challenges, and being the Muammar Gaddafi of the IE world, challenges came in heap. Burucreatic finance systems and Indomie thieves set back the menacing business by a lot, yet approaches were always taken to minimize harms. Whether it’s  changing entire finance processes at ALA or employing elaborate ant-theft mechanisms — much like those guarding Jeremy Muchilwa’s hard drives— Snackshack has proved its adaptability to the ever shifting quicksand that is the ALA environment.

So what is the future looking like for Snackshack? Hopefully a promising one. With the recent acquisition of Snackbar too, possibilities are that a complete monopoly of ALA snack selling is oncoming. However, the atmosphere is getting tense, with a competitive Tradehaul rising (yes I’m glazing our team) can the Snackshack maintain its business prowess or have we witnessed the passing peak of the contender of one of the greatest IE’s the ALA campus has been privileged to witness.

Only time will tell