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backI’m sitting at Truck Central in Abuja, and the first thing I notice isn’t the food.
It’s the numbers.
Moniepoint account numbers are pinned up across the trucks, printed on laminated sheets and pasted where menus usually go. Vendors are calling them out casually, the way you ask for a table number or confirm an order. Someone completes a transfer and glances at their phone, already turning back to their seat before the notification finishes loading. Payment is moving quietly and quickly without drama.
As a food lover, this is the part you don’t always think about while you’re deciding between burgers and shawarma. But sitting here, it’s hard to ignore. Every plate that comes together depends on payments settling instantly, vendors balancing stock, and ingredients being restocked without waiting for Monday or the reconciliation cycle to pass.
The park feels busy but held together, and only after watching this for a while do I start to ask Chef Stone how we got here.
2014 📍Austin, Texas
In 2014, Jon Favreau’s Chef premiered and inspired a generation of food lovers, especially Chef Stone, that great food does not need white tablecloths. Sometimes all it needs is a truck, a city, and someone stubborn enough to keep going.
When Chef premiered at South by Southwest in March, Chef Stone had been cooking for fourteen years, a stretch of time that, in traditional sushi kitchens, is often enough for an apprentice to move from washing rice and sharpening knives to being trusted to serve sushi professionally.
2016 📍FCT, Abuja
Two years later, Chef Stone visited Abuja for the first time. He was there to teach a masterclass. A culinary instructor himself, he trained chefs through his company, Red Dish Chronicles. But Abuja, ever the city to dish out its own lessons, taught him something instead: trucks can move here without competing for space. The road network was well-structured, and Abuja was calm in a practical way. He fell in love with the city.
So even though He knew Lagos would happen eventually, which he tells me casually, like someone who has already made peace with the scale of his own ambition. Abuja felt like the right place to begin—a place where a food truck could make sense without constantly explaining itself.
2019 📍 Wuse 2
By the time we reach 2019 in his journey, Chef Stone already owns his first food truck. The people of the Buj remember seeing it driving through neighbourhoods in Wuse 2; parking, serving and moving again.
One day, he stopped and asked himself a serious question: instead of moving around every day, what if he parked the truck and built something people could come to?
He parked the truck, focused on marketing and consistency, and people started showing up. From the profits of that first truck, he saved every naira and bought a second truck when customers wanted food and drinks in one place. Then he built a sitting area because people wanted a place to stay and eat. Then he added an ice cream truck for families with kids.
From one truck, he built three and created the foundation for what would become West Africa’s first food truck park.
2023📍Central Business District
Operating Truck Central, as Chef Stone describes it, is less about spectacle and more about orchestration. Nothing here runs itself. Food businesses, especially ones built around multiple operators, depend on rhythm. Break that rhythm, even briefly, and everything stutters.
Money is where that rhythm is most sensitive.
Before Moniepoint entered the picture in 2023, payments followed timelines that didn’t align with the park's reality. Sales made on a Friday could sit unresolved until Monday. For a business that buys ingredients daily and pays vendors regularly, those delays created friction: chicken suppliers, drink vendors, none of whom operate on deferred timelines.
Chef Stone tells me that ease of doing business matters to him more than any other operational factor. As someone who receives money daily, he needs to see it immediately, understand its source, and know how it moves across his businesses. He runs multiple operations under the same company. He needs to tell, at a glance, whether one truck is performing differently from another, whether a weekday slump is typical or worth investigating, and whether a weekend spike requires more stock next time.
Moniepoint solves that layer quietly and consistently.
Sitting across from him and Chi Chi, who manages the park’s social media, I learn that the Moniepoint account numbers I see everywhere were not planned as a park-wide decision. Vendors noticed how easily payments settled, how balances reflected instantly, and how charges were visible without reconciliation delays and signed up.
When new truck owners joined the park and asked which payment system he recommended, Moniepoint came up naturally. People arrive for one thing and often eat something else, and in that way, one customer becomes many transactions.
2025📍Lagos, Nigeria
Expansion had always been part of the plan. Again, Lagos was never a question of if, only when. However, expansion drains cash quickly, and relying solely on personal funds would have left Abuja strained.
Moniepoint’s working capital loans allowed Chef Stone to keep Abuja running while committing capital to Lagos, separating growth from survival. The Lagos location launched about two months ago, while Truck Central Abuja continues to operate without interruption.
Lagos is operational, Ibadan is on the horizon, and a global franchise is where Truck Central is headed next. If something is for every African, everywhere, then believe Moniepoint is on this truck ride, with financial happiness in tow.
Sitting here now, surrounded by more than twenty food trucks operating side by side, I look up to the sky and think: this is what powering dreams looks like in practice.
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Moniepoint is Africa’s fastest-growing company for every African, everywhere—from food trucks to marketplaces, single operators to growing ecosystems, we build financial tools that move at the pace of real business. See how at moniepoint.com.
