A dream come true

Staff Reporter

Daniel Luciano is a teacher by profession and the subjects that he teaches are geography and history. As he was growing up, eating bread for breakfast was a luxury and his family solely depended on eating “okatete”, a soft mahangu porridge.

“I always longed to eat bread, but later on, I thought to myself that I should one day own a bakery that can supply bread to the residents,” said Luciano.

“I always had a dream of opening a bakery since I was young. The dream was of course inspired by my upbringing and the fact that we only ate bread occasionally. After conducting extensive research within his community, he opened the doors of his bakery, Omashaka Bakery in Ondangwa, northern Namibia, in September 2019.”

At the moment, Omashaka Bakery supplies Ondangwa and nearby villages and towns with bread and Brötchen to order. According to Luciano, his team and he experienced a few difficulties when it came to penetrating the market.

“At first they (Ondangwa residents) were reluctant to buy our product, but they were convinced to buy our bread because of the quality of our bread. Our bread speaks for itself as it is 10 times tastier than normal bread,” he said.

In addition, the Covid-19 pandemic was also one of the difficulties he experienced as when the business was starting to pick up, they were hit by the pandemic.

“The lockdowns restricted our customers and people not being able to buy bread as they would during our time of normalcy,” he said.

His bakery also had to reduce the number of employees from six to two due to the economic downturn.

“Another challenge we experienced was that our bakery was operating on small machinery and due to this, we could sometimes not be able to supply the demand.”

Omashaka Bakery however plans to grow, expand and even employ many people. “Only the future can really tell, but we are confident that things will be fine. We will do our best and God will do the rest as we continue to feed the nation.”