Zest is a platform built to collect structured data on African stores through a range of business tools designed for daily operations. Its goal was twofold: to provide data for consumer-facing tools or research — enabling insights such as identifying the most sustainable business for a location, estimating startup costs, or finding the best areas to launch specific types of businesses — and to offer businesses a high-quality, easy-to-use, and visually appealing set of tools to manage their operations. By collecting data at scale through these tools, Zest aimed to make African business information more accessible while improving the user experience for the stores themselves.

During development, it became clear that many African businesses already rely on their own systems, from Excel spreadsheets to self-built POS tools or even paper and pen. This highlighted the challenge of introducing new tools and showed the importance of designing solutions that integrate with existing workflows. While Zest remained at the MVP stage, it laid the groundwork for a broader solution. Today, the issue of clean, structured African business data is being addressed through CediRates, which acts as a data aggregator rather than building individual collection tools, consolidating information from multiple sources to provide accurate insights for research, analysis, and decision-making.