Devine Oils started in Pretoria with a simple observation: restaurants and hotels were generating used cooking oil every single day, and most of them had no reliable way to get rid of it — let alone get paid for it. Six years later, that observation has grown into a collection and supply operation spanning South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.
The early days were unglamorous. A handful of kitchens, a single vehicle, and a lot of relationship-building with restaurant managers who'd been burned before by collectors who didn't show up on time or didn't pay what they promised. We built our name on doing the boring things reliably — turning up when we said we would, paying in cash on collection, and giving every customer a proper invoice.
That reliability is still the whole model. We agree a price before we collect, we don't renegotiate after the fact, and every collection is logged and invoiced automatically the moment it's confirmed. It sounds unremarkable, but in an industry with a lot of informal, undocumented operators, being boring and dependable is what earned us repeat business from some of South Africa's best-known restaurant groups.
Growth followed trust. As word spread among hospitality groups with operations across borders, expanding into Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe wasn't a strategic pivot so much as a response to customers asking whether we could service their other branches too. Today, "uniting Africa through quality and partnership" isn't just a line in our marketing — it describes how the business actually grew.
Somewhere along the way, we also became a fresh oil supplier — a natural extension once we understood our customers' full kitchen operations, not just their waste stream. Many of the same hotels and restaurants that sell us their used oil now buy their sunflower and palm oil from us too, on the same account, dealt with by the same team.
Six years in, we're still a company built on a handful of values we haven't found reason to change: purity in how we handle every litre, integrity in how we treat every customer, and excellence as the standard we hold ourselves to whether we're collecting from a single café or a five-star hotel group. As it says in Proverbs 16:3 — "Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established." That's been true for us so far, and we're planning for a lot more years like the last six.