In a world where frozen logistics are measured in degrees and decimals, legacy is harder to quantify. However, legacy is as tangible at Chilleweni, a family-run powerhouse in South Africa’s cold chain economy, as the ice-lined warehouse floors of Germiston where it all began.
Beneath the minus 25-degree warehouses and the 3 a.m. stock reconciliations is a story about how legacy businesses evolve, and how they must evolve, without losing their soul. It's about a man with meat in his blood, his actuarial stepson, and a private equity firm with the radical idea that empathy might be a better growth lever than control.
Founded in 2004 by Jakes Small (no relation to James!) to service Gauteng’s meat traders, Chilleweni has grown into one of the country’s quiet giants in refrigerated logistics. Today, with over 37,000 pallet spaces across four sites, including its flagship in Randport Industrial Park, Chilleweni keeps South Africa’s frozen food industry iced from burger patties to chicken nuggets.
But behind the perfectly frozen exterior is a business undergoing a powerful thaw of tradition, of leadership, and of purpose.
Jakes didn’t set out to build a logistics empire. He just wanted to keep meat cold. He started in the abattoirs of Alberton, learning the meat trade with his hands and boots. The old-school way, without a vision statement but plenty of ice and invoices.
But over time, the game changed. The meat traders became national frozen food brands. And cold storage wasn’t just storage anymore it became a logistics matrix. Pallets, throughput, SLAs, traceability. That’s when Jakes’ stepson, Ivan Sutic entered the story.
In 2014, Sutic stepped away from a promising career with Discovery in actuarial science and into the family business. What started as a temporary gap-fill became a decade-long transformation. Ivan brought systems thinking, analytical rigour, and a risk assessment foil to Jakes’ hunger to scale.
By 2025, Chilleweni had grown to four facilities and over 37,000 pallet positions. They offered everything: in-rack blast freezing, handling, transport. Their unique selling proposition? Relentless accuracy. Clients could run lean inventories because Chilleweni never lost track of stock. It wasn’t sexy. It was dependable.
Their partnership became a study in balance: Jakes, the instinctive risk-taker with an entrepreneurial gut; Ivan, the methodical planner who thrives in process and precision. It was a dynamic that worked but one that also recognised its limits.
“We realised we needed to institutionalise,” says Ivan. “Not just for scale, but for sustainability.”
The business was too big to run informally, but too personal to hand over to suits. Growth was no longer just about cold space, it was about codifying culture.
Unlike the dozen private equity firms that had previously knocked, Vuna didn’t pitch a deal. They showed up with curiosity. Over coffee on the stoep, they asked questions about legacy, about employee lineage, about the third-generation forklift operator whose grandfather had packed the first box in 2004. That’s when Jakes leaned forward.
“These guys didn’t talk about exit multiples. They talked about people.”
In May 2024, Vuna took a 30% stake in the business. They got two board seats, Shafiek Rawoot and Kayise Ndlovu, and they brought something family businesses rarely get: governance without bureaucracy, accountability without arrogance. It wasn’t about telling Jakes and Ivan how to run cold storage. It was about helping them make sure someone else could run it, someday.
Vuna didn’t just bring board seats and capital they brought empathy, a rare quality in a sector often defined by a soulless version of capitalism articulated in IRR’s, and new funds raised.
“Most investors talk numbers. Vuna listened to our values first."
Guided by this ethos the partnership has been quietly transformative. A family kitchen-style boardroom culture hasn’t been replaced but it has been reinforced with governance frameworks that allow Chilleweni’s culture to scale without dilution.
One of the first milestones? The company’s inaugural independent audit, completed by Forvis Mazars for FY2024. It marked a turning point in transparency and renewed confidence that systems and improved governance wouldn’t dilute the firm’s family focusses brand of entrepreneurialism.
Layered onto this is a formal B-BBEE journey. Chilleweni is looking to achieve its first target of a Level 6 rating from its February 2025 year-end results.
“Governance is no longer just a compliance issue for us,” says Ivan. “It’s a strategic tool for legacy.”
Business guru Jim Collins might call this the “Flywheel Effect.” The quiet, compounding changes that create momentum. One governance step made the next one easier. One audit created trust that unlocked another contract.
But unlike Collins’ case studies, Chilleweni didn’t start as a great company. It started as a good man making cold rooms work for hot markets. And then it got better. Slowly. Intentionally.
In boardrooms, empathy is usually what you talk about after EBITDA. But at Chilleweni, it’s the operating system.
While capacity has surged, with the addition of 10,000 new pallets from the latest site expansion, people remain at the heart of the Chilleweni model. Third-generation employees are now walking through the same cold store doors their grandfathers once did.
The company is also exploring tailored employee benefits, including wellness solutions and support structures uncommon in industrial logistics.
“You can’t keep the cold chain running without warm hearts,” jokes Jakes dryly.
Ask about expansion, and Ivan will talk about people. “We’re not trying to be the biggest,” he says. “We’re trying to be the best. And that starts with how we treat our clients and our employees.”
For now, the focus is on consolidation. But with demand for cold storage climbing, driven by rising food exports, e-commerce logistics, and import substitution, Chilleweni is positioning itself as the most agile player in the market.
Ask about risk, and Jakes will tell you about load shedding. The company runs full solar and diesel backups at its sites. It’s not because they want to, it’s because they have to. Cold storage doesn’t get second chances.
That resilience. That hulle weet nie wat ons weet nie South African DNA, born of necessity, sustained by discipline, is Chilleweni’s edge.
Legacy is about more than succession. It’s about systems that outlast sentiment.
That’s what Vuna helped the team see. That building for endurance means letting go. Not of control, but of the assumption that things will just keep working because they always have.
The irony? By letting others in, the family preserved the one thing they feared losing: the essence.
“It’s like sending your child to university,” Ivan says. “It hurts to let go. But it’s the only way to see them thrive.”
Chilleweni isn’t done. Not by a long shot. But it has passed the test that most mid-sized businesses fail: the institutionalisation of heart.
The freezers hum on in Germiston. The stock rotates. The audit trails are cleaner. The people stay longer. The business grows stronger.
And in the cool silence of a loading dock at 4 a.m., you’d be forgiven for thinking this is just another warehouse.
But if you look a little closer, you’ll see it’s a case study in how to build something enduring without losing what made it worth building in the first place.