The woman who moved to Wales, learnt Welsh and became the hot sauce queen
“People were telling me, ‘This is so good, you should bottle this’ and that’s what I did.” Branwen Jones reports
GROWING up, Margaret Ogunbanwo was surrounded by cooking. Born in the UK but raised in Nigeria, Maggie remembers her grandmother was always cooking in the kitchen and her mother baking cakes. She knew from an early age that cooking and food would play a part in her future, but never knew to what extent or in what direction. Years later, her passion and flare would lead her to launching a successful culinary business more than 4,600 miles away in Wales.
“I was actually brought up around really great cooks,” she says. “My grandmother did all the cooking for us, for as long as I could remember, she was the one always cooking in one way or another.
“My mother ran her own cafés and she would always be baking or selling cakes. My father was from Nigeria and my mother was from Cameroon. We lived in Lagos most of the time, but from time to time, we would visit Cameroon. My food influences came from both countries, and that’s where my interest in cooking came from.”
In 1988, 23-year-old Maggie married her husband Femi and the couple decided to move to the UK, with the plan to stay in the country for 10 years before returning to Nigeria. While living in Harlow, Essex, Maggie followed in her mother’s footsteps and ran her own cafés, while she also taught in food hygiene.
As the years went by, Maggie and Femi also welcomed two children – their daughter named Ileri and their son named Toda, who has become a well-known Welsh-language rapper by the name Sage Todz. The family would frequently holiday in Wales.
“Our holidays were always in north Wales, but each time, we went to different places,” Maggie recalls. “We went to Dolgellau, Betws-y-coed, Pentrefelin, Criccieth, Dinas Mawddwy and so on. But the most memorable holiday we had was when I turned 40. We came with a group of family friends to north Wales. From then, my husband and I decided – seeing that our 10-year plan to return to Nigeria didn’t happen, we would retire to north Wales instead.”
But the temptation to move before their retirement age was strong, and so Maggie and her family decided to move from Essex to the Gwynedd village of Penygroes in 2007. After spending 18 years in Harlow, the move would be a huge adjustment for Maggie and her family for several reasons.
She says: “We thought we would retire here, so at the time we moved, it was outside our plans but it was exciting because it was always a place that we loved. But we didn’t come here with any huge savings or anything. It was difficult for us to buy a property, but it eventually came through. It was a different experience as well because we had been living with all our family and friends – all that was familiar. We didn’t know anyone in north Wales.
“I had been self-employed for quite some time. When we moved to Penygroes, the initial plan was to see what jobs that were available and go for it, but it proved quite difficult, because where we moved to was an 80 per cent Welsh-speaking area. My husband was looking for jobs but Welsh was required for most of them, so he was going further and further out.”
While Maggie was looking for work, she decided to use the time to start cooking again. After three weeks of living in Penygroes, she stumbled on a farmers’ market in the nearby village of Talysarn but realised it was missing something.
“There was none of my type of cooking there,” she says. “So the next week, I decided to join the market and started going to that market.”
And from there, Maggie’s Exotic Foods was born. With every farmers’ market, Maggie would introduce customers to various dishes that were a celebration of her Nigerian and Cameroonian heritage, such as bean cakes, puff puffs, spicy meat pies and onion fritters.
As delicious as the food was, Maggie initially found it a challenge.
She says: “It wasn’t easy because my business was called ‘Maggie’s Exotic Foods’ at the time and people’s definition of ‘exotic’ was different to mine. They were hesitant to invite me to these places until people began to see what I had.
“People could recognise what I had but maybe in a different form. There were those that were curious and there were those who were not. It was a bit of hard work, I would make all this food and if I hadn’t sold it, I’d come back home, I would have to freeze it and my family got fed up with it.”
But Maggie said she was determined to bring her food to north Wales’ culinary table.
“While I started at the market, I also started Welsh lessons – I was so determined to learn the language. By now, people will say that I am fluent in Welsh.
“I was also determined because we had to bring in income and we had to eat. While my husband was still working in Essex to bring in money, I went to the farmers’ market, made some money, bought some things for the next farmers’ market and used the rest to eat. It was survival – especially as the kids were still in school. I needed to pay for this and that, it was my way of bringing in income.”
But Maggie started looking for other ways of getting her food out to more people. After words of encouragement from customers and friends alike, Maggie decided to open her own café in 2010, which was called Y Crochan Blasus and was ideally located right where she and her family lived.
“I would host African evenings, where I would offer three course meals to try and introduce Africa to Wales,” Maggie explains. “We lived in an old pub called the Red Lion, it was a huge building and we used the old bar for the café.”
But as the business venture gained momentum, Maggie was struck by personal tragedies.
“It was a success at first,” she says. “But then I had one family disaster after another. I lost my father and then I lost my sister, so I couldn’t be around the café for a while. When I got back, things had deteriorated and it seemed that they
I would host African evenings, where I would offer three course meals to try and introduce Africa to Wales. We lived in an old pub called the Red Lion, it was a huge building and we used the old bar for the café
were continuing to deteriorate. So I closed the café, but kept up the African evenings as a pop-up restaurant and those were really well attended.
“We had them here in Penygroes, we had them in Pentrefelin, we had them on Anglesey. We would go to as many different places as we could. And we got a good response from these evenings as well, people got to know me and my food through these African evenings.”
It was during one African evening that Maggie’s customers pointed out the ‘gunpowder’ sauce she had served them.
“Most African countries have their own hot sauces, but especially West African countries,” she explains.
“After one African evening, people were exclaiming and said, ‘Gosh, you gave us gunpowder’. I had my family taste the sauce afterwards. I can only take so much heat, when I tasted it, it was really hot but immediately after I got the flavours. People were telling me, ‘This is so good, you should bottle this’ and that’s what I did.”
The hot sauces were launched in 2016 during the popular food festival, Gwyl Fwyd Caernarfon, and were met with instant success.
She says: “I was sold out by 2pm in Gwyl Fwyd Caernarfon. Whereas I was making £35, £40, at most £80, at the farmers’ market, at the food festival I had made over £700 that day.”
Maggie’s business, Maggie’s African Twist, offers
four different bottled hot sauces – Maggie’s Original African Chilli Sauce, Maggie’s Hot & Sweet African Chilli Sauce, Maggie’s Roasted with Balsamic African Chilli Sauce and Maggie’s Green African Chilli Sauce. The Penygroes businesswoman also hopes to introduce a blackcoloured hot sauce in the future.
Customers can also buy seasoning for their dishes, and find out new recipes and cooking tips through Maggie’s various cookbooks and Youtube tutorials. Recently, Maggie appeared on BBC’S The Hairy Bikers’ Go West programme, which saw Si King and the late Dave Myers visit her in Penygroes. Following the episode’s airing, Maggie explained that the sale of her hot sauces had gone up remarkably, with the business receiving 300 orders in just one day.
When asked about the experience of filming with the iconic duo, Maggie says: “I had a wonderful time with them. You often wonder with programmes if what you see is what you get – they were such lovely people. Once we stopped filming, they didn’t rush away, they spent half the day with me. At one point, we were just sitting down and chatting.”
She adds: “They warned us that we might see a real surge in our product, and we did. We don’t usually have that many orders and we weren’t set up to process that many in a day. But we have received a really good response, it has such a spotlight on our business and catapulted us outside of Wales. We’ve received messages from the Netherlands and even Singapore, with people asking if I had outlets out there.”
Maggie feels that her aim of bringing African cuisine to those in Wales who may never go to Africa has been a success, and in return she, her family and business have found a place they can call home.
“I have people today saying, ‘Oh, we know Maggie, we know Maggie’s food’,” she says. “They are happy to try it and are not wondering if it would be too hot or too different to what they are used to.”
She adds: “It is true what they say, food can bring people together.
“I always say that if I want to get to know someone better, I’ll invite you to my house and share a meal with you. Food does connect us, we are able to chat and share over a dinner table. What I like about our African tradition is that all our bowls are put at the centre of the table – we eat from them and we eat communally, it brings a sense of place, a sense of being with people that you can trust.”