Some stories start with a plan. This one started in a queue.
In the small town of Edenville, near Lindley in the Free State, a young girl stood holding her mother's hand outside the Standard Bank. Beside them, Ouma Deborah was chatting to the woman behind her. The subject was a recipe. A traditional mosbolletjie bread, made with the hops plant for yeast, then cut and dried into beskuit. The two women swapped it on the back of an envelope, on the patio in front of the old trade store.
Nobody in that queue could have known it would change the Venter family forever.
That envelope became the family recipe. In a small coal-fired stove, the breads rose and filled the house with the smell of sweet sourdough. Tannie Alette still remembers the jar of starter culture on the kitchen counter. Fed. Nurtured. Kept alive. Thirty years on, that same recipe is the reason Alette's Rusks sits in almost 1,200 stores across South Africa.
It would be easy to tell this as a business story. Growth. Milestones. National distribution. But that is not what Alette's is really about. It is a human story. A recipe passed between two women. A marriage built on encouragement. A promise never to cut corners. September is Heritage Month, which makes it the right time to tell it.
A recipe, a marriage, and a nudge
Aletta Johanna Venter, or Tannie Alette as most people know her, spent her early years at JBM Hertzog in Bloemfontein. It was there she met Henri Venter, the love of her life and her late husband. Henri was a headmaster for many years, first at Fontainebleau Primary and later at Helpmekaar College. But he was an entrepreneur at heart, and he was her biggest supporter. He loved her mosbolletjie beskuit. So much so that he gave her the courage to do her own thing, and later helped her turn a home recipe into a real business.
It started at Piekfyn
Tannie Alette wanted to stand on her own two feet. She began selling potpourri and dried flower arrangements at a small home industry called Piekfyn. Piekfyn already sold mosbolletjie breads and beskuit, and when their usual baker went on holiday, they asked if she could step in. As luck would have it, she had the perfect recipe. Still written faintly on the back of that envelope.
The breads did exceptionally well. Before long, Henri suggested she bake for clients beyond Piekfyn. He helped her work out the pricing. Together with her loyal helper, Suzan, she worked the dough by hand in the afternoons, covered it with heater blankets to prove overnight, and was up before 4am kneading it into balls. Who knew a 2.5kg bag of flour made three breads?
Building it by hand
A restraint of trade limited her to a 10km range around Piekfyn, so Henri nudged her to think bigger. She teamed up with Rina Nel, who baked fudge, and together they cold-called small stores in Pretoria, one by one. Every morning they climbed into the car. Rina at the wheel, Alette as co-pilot with the map book on her lap and rusks packed in second-hand boxes. They planned a circular route to save petrol between the few stores they supplied, and often stopped for a slice of cake and a cup of tea before heading home to mix the next day's orders.
They soon realised the home industries took a large commission and only paid at month-end. So they focused on Spars and delis, where the cash came in straight away. Their first big retail store was Groenkloof Spar. Pieter took orders generously, let Alette deliver to the front, and paid up front. From one Spar it grew to four. Then delis. Then many more.
From the kitchen to the garage
The kitchen in their Boskruin home soon grew too small for its two convection ovens, so the business moved to the garage. A rite of passage for many small businesses. Henri improvised whenever cash was tight, building oven stands by hand, a homemade drying oven, and space for a new industrial mixer.
Within two years they had outgrown the garage. They moved to a property in Gertrude Street, Fontainebleau, installed an industrial prover and a bigger oven, grew the team to five, and hired their first driver. Elsa answered the phones. Alette baked. Henri kept the whole team moving.
The pack you would recognise anywhere
They began with two flavours of bran rusks. After buying a small rusk business in Kya Sands and reworking the original recipes, sales doubled, and two flavours soon became 12. The stacked herringbone pack became their signature, and they were the first rusk supplier to seal every packet with a twine ribbon. Look along any shelf today and you will see others packing the same way. A compliment of its own.
Scale, loss, and staying the course
When Henri retired around 2000, they made a bold move into bigger premises in Honeydew, using his pension to buy the ovens and equipment a growing business needed. Around the same time, their son Henri Jnr came home from London and joined the business, delivering in the mornings before coming on full-time and learning to make the sourdough himself. The recipe that started on the back of an envelope was already being handed to the next pair of hands.
Checkers listed the range in its Great North region, and Alette's won supplier of the year. Dischem followed. The business roughly doubled every two years. Henri passed away after a short illness in 2014. Tannie Alette kept going.
Thirty years, same promise
The business flourished, even through the Covid years, and moved into a 6,000m² facility near Cosmo City. Today, 140 staff bake 17 flavours for almost 1,200 stores nationwide. Through all of it, one promise has held firm: the quality will never be sacrificed. The Alette's logo stands for that promise, and the plan is to honour it for the next 100 years.
Still nudging the next generation on
If you ever meet Tannie Alette, you will find her humble, kind, and generous. An avid gardener who spends as much time caring for people as she does walking the factory floor, where the staff call her mevrou out of respect and affection. She is who she is, she will tell you, because of all of them. At 71, she still stands on her patio holding her grandsons' hands, smiling, nudging them on to find their own journey.
From a recipe on the back of an envelope to almost 1,200 shelves across the country, one thing has never changed. Good beskuit, made with care, brings people together.
Happiness is handmade. And it starts with a rusk.
Watch Tannie Alette tell her story in her own words, then share yours. What tradition has your family kept for 30 years?
Tag us with #TydVirBeskuit.
