Realise A Dream

Ladles of Love Realise A Dream (RAD) is an Food Enterprise Development Programme created to support and enable Food Entrepreneurs and Agripreneurs with a view to sustaining and expanding their enterprises.

Working in communities on a weekly basis, we see first-hand the impact of unemployment on people who line up for food at our soup kitchens every day, in order to survive.  Our aim with RAD is to encourage the establishment and sustainability of more food enterprises allowing people to earn, and feed their families with dignity.

Annually we scout for pioneering people to enter our Realise A Dream Food Entrepreneurship Competition across four categories: Baking and Confectionery; Food Products or Processing; Food Service or Eateries; Farming Produce or Husbandry.

Five finalists in each category are selected from the contestant entries and rewarded with a 10-day entrepreneurship workshop.  We believe this helps in levelling the playing fields before each finalists gets to pitch their dreams to our expert judges, who then select the winners.

With RAD all our finalists are winners as they become members of our RAD Entrepreneurs Club, which is a networking platform allowing members to connect and share opportunities with one another.  Our regular RAD Club lunches are hosted to educate, inspire and motivate with guest speakers sharing stories of inspiration and encouragement.  

Investment in socio-economic development is critical to growth and here our key sponsors provide capital expenditure for our RAD winners, allowing them to ‘Realise A ‘Dream.   Ladles of Love manages procurement of the Capex items on behalf of sponsors ensuring the spend is leveraged and accounted for by using professional service providers. 

The prize pool for the competition is sourced from sponsors who have products or services that are game-changers for our finalists and winners.  Ranging from uniforms to ingredients, utensils, graphic design, training,  and point of sale units – each year we endeavour to secure as many prizes for all finalists as we can.  Our four winners however receive Capex and together with four our runners up, attend a 7-month golden mentorship programme. 

The competition is open to anyone over the age of 20 years who has a valid South African ID and owns a business that has been operating in Cape Town or any of the Cape Peninsula areas for 12 months or more but less than five years.   It is our intent to expand the programme to Gauteng and in time to the other major cities of South Africa.

We believe that our Enterprise Development Programmes like RAD can address the challenges entrepreneurs have in understanding business fundamentals, finance and route-to-market.  It is our intent that with the right investment and support from sponsors we can do more, for more and expand our programme.