A front door for the kitchens already cooking around you.
Pottly started from a simple observation: some of the best Nigerian and West African cooking in the GTA is coming out of home kitchens with no website, no listing and no way to be found beyond a WhatsApp group.
Home cooks and small kitchens are everywhere in the Nigerian and West African community here. They cook to order, in portions people can afford, and they are usually a short drive from the person who wants the food. What they do not have is a way to be discovered by anyone who is not already in the group chat.
The delivery apps did not solve this. Their economics are built for restaurants with margin to give away, and a home cook selling a plate of jollof cannot hand over a third of it to a platform. So the cooks stayed on WhatsApp, and the customers stayed unable to find them.
Pottly is the smallest thing that fixes that. A cook gets a real profile, a real menu and a real price list. A customer gets to search by dish, by kitchen or by area, see what is actually near them, and then message the cook directly. No account to browse, no checkout, no commission — an e-Transfer or cash at the door.
We are deliberately not a delivery company. Pottly does not take your order, hold your money, or promise you a delivery window. It gets you to the right kitchen and then gets out of the way — which is exactly how ordering from a neighbour has always worked.
Four rules we do not bend.
The cook sets the price
Pottly adds no commission and no service fee. What a kitchen charges is what a customer pays, and the kitchen keeps all of it.
Browsing should never need an account
Being asked to sign up before you can see what food exists near you is the fastest way to lose someone who is hungry. So we do not ask.
Let people talk to people
Ordering from a home cook is a conversation, not a checkout. Pottly hands you off to WhatsApp or SMS and stays out of it.
Say only what is true
No invented user counts, no borrowed logos, no badges we did not earn. If a number is not real, it does not go on the page.
Cooking something worth finding?
Let the people already living around you know you exist.