After years of delivering cooked meals, laundry, and home cleaning to Lagos households, Eden Life is pressing pause on its consumer business.
The Nigerian home services startup has suspended its individual subscriptions to concentrate on corporate catering and industrial food operations, a segment it says offers stronger margins and a clearer path to profitability.
The company described the move as a strategic reset aimed at reaching profitability by 2026. In a statement released on Wednesday, Eden Life said it is consolidating resources and doubling down on its business-to-business (B2B) operations.
“For Eden Life, ‘pausing’ is a strategic transition,” the company said. “It means we are temporarily de-prioritising our individual consumer (B2C) offerings to focus on our high-growth, profitable B2B market.”
The decision reflects the mounting pressure on consumer startups operating in Nigeria’s strained economy. Over the past two years, record food inflation, foreign exchange volatility, rising logistics costs, and a shrinking middle class partly driven by emigration have made it increasingly difficult to scale household subscription services sustainably.
Eden Life confirmed that its on-demand cleaning, laundry, and individual food subscriptions are now on “hiatus.” However, its industrial catering and corporate food subscription services will continue, which the company describes as its primary growth drivers.
The shift was finalised in October 2025 after what Eden Life called a “rigorous internal audit” of its unit economics.
Customers were first informed on January 7, when Lagos-based subscribers received an email notifying them that services had been paused “until further notice,” with refunds to follow.
“After thoughtful consideration, management has decided to pause our services until further notice,” the company told customers. “This was not an easy decision, and it comes from a place of wanting to reset, reflect, and return stronger.”
Founded in Lagos in 2019 by three former Andela employees, including Nadayar Enegesi, Eden Life positioned itself as a convenience-focused solution for time-strapped professionals willing to pay a premium for managed home services. The startup handled logistics and quality control while third-party providers executed the services.
Subscribers could bundle cooked meals, laundry, and home cleaning into a single plan. But since 2023, prices have climbed sharply amid inflation. Daily meal plans rose to about ₦150,000 ($100), while minimum service spends ranged from ₦5,000 to ₦11,500 ($3–$8), depending on the offering.
Food subscriptions, once the company’s flagship product, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when affluent Lagos households leaned on managed services gradually became harder to sustain as economic conditions worsened.
“The viability of individual food subscriptions was challenged by macroeconomic factors over the last 24 months,” the company said.
By pivoting further into corporate subscriptions and industrial catering, Eden Life says it has found “a more sustainable way” to deliver quality at scale in the current economy. The company added that many of its former premium household customers are now reached indirectly through the organisations it serves.
The reset follows years of fundraising and expansion. Eden Life raised about $600,000 in pre-seed funding before securing a $1.4 million seed round in 2021 backed by LocalGlobe, Future Africa, and Enza Capital.
A former employee, who requested anonymity because they were not authorised to speak on internal finances, said the startup was generating roughly $1 million in annual recurring revenue at one point. The company has not publicly confirmed that figure.
As venture funding tightened across Africa from 2023, Eden Life expanded its offerings, launching Eden Marketplace for groceries and household goods, introducing a food sub-brand called Homemade by Eden, and opening kitchens in Lagos to manage meal production directly.
The latest pullback suggests those efforts were not enough to shield its consumer arm from Nigeria’s ongoing economic headwinds and that, for now, serving companies may prove more sustainable than serving households.The fallout from the pause has been most visible in customer refund complaints.
Some Lagos customers took to X to say they had paid for cleaning or food services that were never delivered. In response, Eden Life said 90% of refund requests have been resolved.
“The remaining 10% are not a result of liquidity issues,” the company said, framing the delays as procedural rather than financial.
In an earlier message to customers in January, Eden Life had explained that refunds would be processed “in batches.” The company has not disclosed how many customers were affected.
The retrenchment is not limited to Nigeria.
In 2022, Eden Life expanded into Kenya through the acquisition of Lynk, a Nairobi-based platform that connects informal workers to jobs. The company has now confirmed that it also paused B2C services in Kenya.
“We have paused B2C services in Kenya while our B2B clients are currently supported through a partner-led model. We are in the process of securing capital to settle existing obligations and fund our restart,” the company said. “While this is taking longer than anticipated, it is a deliberate move to ensure that our next phase in Kenya is built on a much more sustainable foundation.”
In 2025, the company relocated its Nairobi office from Westlands, according to people familiar with its operations. Around the same time, the Eden Life app began experiencing issues with new user registrations in Kenya.
Two people close to the company’s local operations said the signup function has not been working since 2025, effectively preventing the platform from onboarding new customers.
As of 2026, LinkedIn profiles indicated that Eden Life employed between 50 and 80 people across Nigeria and Kenya, although it is unclear how many staff remain following the restructuring.
For now, the company says it is seeking fresh capital to settle outstanding obligations and restart operations in Kenya. It maintains that the consumer business has been deferred not permanently shut down.
“We believe this reintegration of B2C services is in the very near future,” the company said.
Leave a Reply