Free delivery in Accra over GH₵ 250 · Ordered before noon, on your street today
How a counter in Osu became a shop
The long version, because people ask. Six years from a metre of rented shelf to a counter on Lokko Road, two riders and a label of our own.
2019 to today
Six years, in the order they happened
No round numbers and no turning points. Just what changed, the year it changed, and who was standing there when it did.
One metre of shelf, rented
Kojo Aidoo was dispensing at a pharmacy off Oxford Street and kept being asked for things it did not carry: a magnesium that did not keep people up, a vitamin D nobody had to bring back from London themselves. He rented a metre of shelf behind the counter and put nine products on it.
The exercise book and the motorbike
When Accra shut in March the shelf could not be reached and the phone did not stop. Orders went into a school exercise book and Kwabena ran them across town on his own motorbike, Dansoman to Adenta, eleven drops on the worst day. The book is still in the office drawer.
The first batch we paid to test
A customer asked what was actually in the magnesium and the only answer we had was what the label said. The first independent assay cost more than the batch was worth and came back clean. The second, from a different supplier, did not, and went back on the lorry it arrived on.
Fourteen Lokko Road
A narrow shop with room for a counter, four shelves and two chairs. The chairs turned out to matter more than the shelves: most people who come through the door want to ask something before they buy anything, and standing up is a bad way to ask it.
Our own name on the bottle
After four years of selling other people's formulations we started making our own, beginning with Magnesium Night. Glycinate rather than oxide, because the cheap form is the reason most people give up on magnesium in the first fortnight. Six of the eight things on the shelf now carry our name.
Same day, across Accra
Two riders, a van on Fridays and a cut-off at noon. Ordered before it, on your street by evening, anywhere inside the ring road. Kumasi, Takoradi and Tamale are two working days by courier, and you get the rider's number when it leaves us.
How a batch gets on the shelf
Four steps, and the third one is the one no distributor has ever asked us to do.
01
The form first, the price last
We settle which form of the mineral we want and at what dose, then ask who can make it that way. Doing it in the other order is how a shelf fills up with magnesium oxide.
02
The lab, before anything else
An independent laboratory in Accra assays every batch for potency and for heavy metals. We pay for that test whether the batch passes or fails, which is the only arrangement worth having.
03
Four of us take it for a month
Thirty days on the new batch before it is listed. It is not a trial and we would not call it one, but it has kept two products off the shelf that the certificate said were fine.
04
The certificate goes in the box
Your batch number and its result ship with the order. If the slip is missing, ring the counter and it will be in your inbox the same afternoon.
What the six years came to
Counted at the end of July. We change them when they change rather than when they flatter us.
Years since the first nine products
Batches sent out for testing
People on the payroll
Of Accra orders that land the same day
“I bought the greens expecting to hate them and I have now reordered four times. What actually won me over was the certificate in the box with a real batch number on it.”
Adjoa Mensah
Teacher, Labone
The two chairs are still there
14 Lokko Road, Osu, Accra, nine to six Monday to Saturday. Come and ask something before you buy anything, which is what the chairs by the counter were bought for.
