Nigeria’s foodservice industry is undergoing its biggest transformation since the emergence of modern fast-food chains four decades ago, with digital payments, embedded finance, and business management platforms replacing cash-driven operations and changing how restaurants, food vendors, and quick-service chains operate.
Digital Payments Reshape the Industry
The industry has evolved into an $11.09 billion market in 2025, powered by instant payments, cloud kitchens, food delivery platforms, and integrated financial technology, according to a new case study by Moniepoint.
The report titled What it takes to feed Nigeria every day: The payment story behind its foodservice industry projects the market will expand to $19.31 billion by 2030, representing an annual growth rate of 11.73 percent.
For the food industry, analysts say this marks a fundamental transition from simply accepting electronic payments to operating entirely on digital financial infrastructure.
From Cash to Digital
“The real competitive question today is how deeply that payment infrastructure is woven into the way the business actually runs day to day,” said Tosin Eniolorunda, group chief executive officer of Moniepoint Inc.
Tosin Eniolorunda and his team are ensuring that payments are connected to inventory, inventory to recipes, recipes to procurement, procurement to credit, and credit to growth plans.
Nigeria’s organised restaurant industry has changed dramatically since UAC opened Kingsway Rendezvous in 1973 before launching Mr Bigg’s in 1986, a move widely regarded as the birth of Nigeria’s modern fast-food industry.
Today, more than 800 quick-service restaurant outlets operate across Nigeria, while online gas ambitions have led to significant growth in the food delivery market, which has become a $1.04 billion market on its own.
Challenges and Opportunities
Despite the industry’s growth, restaurant operations remained overwhelmingly cash-based until recently, with operators counting cash manually, transporting daily sales to banks, searching endlessly for change during busy periods and reconciling transactions outlet by outlet.
The report notes that the industry’s reliance on cash was less about preference than necessity, as electronic payment infrastructure remained limited and unreliable for much of the 1990s and early 2000s.
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A turning point came in 2012 when the Central Bank of Nigeria introduced its cashless policy to reduce dependence on physical cash and encourage electronic payments.
As digital payments became mainstream following the cash redesign crisis of 2023 and Nigeria’s renewed push towards cashless transactions, food businesses accelerated their adoption of POS terminals and instant bank transfers.
Moniepoint’s data show POS terminal usage among quick-service restaurants on its network has increased significantly since the tightening of Nigeria’s cashless policy in 2023.
Women in the Food Economy
One of the report’s most striking findings is the dominance of women across Nigeria’s food economy, with women owning a large percentage of businesses in the accommodation and food services sector, making it the country’s most female-dominated industry.
Despite this dominance, access to finance remains one of the sector’s biggest obstacles, with the International Finance Corporation estimating Nigeria’s MSME financing gap.
The inability to access working capital is particularly damaging during festive seasons when restaurants require additional inventory to meet spikes in consumer demand.
Moniepoint now offers restaurants same-day settlement instead of the traditional next-day settlement used by most banks.
Its automated transfer confirmation eliminates manual verification, while embedded lending assesses businesses using transaction histories rather than physical collateral.
Beyond financial services, Moniepoint has expanded into restaurant management software, allowing operators to monitor inventory, manage recipes, reconcile orders from delivery platforms, and detect operational leakages in real time.
As consumer payments become instant and business processes become automated, the country’s restaurants are evolving from cash-intensive enterprises into data-driven businesses capable of expanding faster, managing costs more efficiently, and accessing capital based on real commercial performance rather than physical assets.