A former 19-year-old refugee makes her mark as a food entrepreneur

Entrepreneur Award Finalist – Delight (Dee) Mapasure

Life for Dee began in Uzumba, a small village in Zimbabwe where she would go to school barefoot, walking for long distances.  At 19 she arrived in England as a refugee, initially struggling to settle into a new culture and facing many incidents of racism, bias and often stereotyped as being ‘one of those people’.

Through a resilience that has shaped her life since, Dee decided to find opportunities rather than dwell on misfortunes and through volunteering, became integrated into her local area.

“In the early days of K’s Wors my whole family were involved in making sausages”.

Dee is founder of K’s Wors a multi-award-winning eclectic range of Southern African inspired Boerewors (sausages). She is passionate about shaking up the UK’s incumbent premium sausage offering and has recently secured a national listing with Ocado.

K’s Wors is her second enterprise after establishing a successful urban cleaning company whilst working in the civil service and securing an Open University Diploma in Law.

Using the profits from her cleaning business, Dee started the food brand from her kitchen table with the help of her husband. It took two years of experimenting with flavours and recipes to develop K’s Wors sausage into a shelf-ready product.

“All the production time, as well as the time building brand awareness and networking was so much that I sometimes questioned whether I’d made the right decision”

Thanks to her hard work and determination, K’s Wors boerewors sausages can now be found on Ocado, in Costco, and were praised for their distinct taste on the BBC TV Dragons’ Den.

She is a member of the British African Business Alliance; a not-for-profit organization that supports entrepreneurs from African backgrounds both in the UK and on the continent.