Months of planning had coalesced into three days of ingredient preparation. Knives against chopping boards, the steady thrum of blenders puréeing peppers, cartons of tomatoes stacked high like a fortress. A hundred hands peeling onions until eyes watered, and washing bags of rice until its streams ran clear. For three days, Lagos became an assembly line of patience and precision.
And then, on a single Friday, the city watched it all come together. Trucks delivered ingredients to the site. Custom-made pots — engineered in Nigeria, tested with hundreds of kilograms of rice in dry runs — were lowered into place. The scale was staggering: 200 cartons of basmati rice, 600 cartons of tomato paste, seasoning cubes piled into pyramids. Yet what lingered was not just the numbers, but the feeling: that something larger than logistics was unfolding.
The air itself seemed thick with anticipation and aroma — a heady mix of fried tomatoes, garlic, and the faint burn of pepper that clung to clothes. Volunteers cracked jokes as tears streamed down their faces from the mountain of onions, laughing through the sting. At one point, Hilda herself joked that the mountain of rice “looked like a wedding gift for Lagos itself.” The humour didn’t lighten the work, but it made the exhaustion bearable.
At the centre of it all stood Hilda Baci, 29 years old, braids pulled back, dressed in custom print pants and her chef’s jacket. She had done this before — cooked her way into the Guinness World Records with endurance that seemed impossible — but this time was different. This was not about personal ambition, though there was plenty of that. This was about gathering. About proving that food, at its most powerful, is not a solitary act but a communal one.
By nightfall, as the steam of Jollof rose into the Lagos sky, the numbers would matter — 8,700+ kilograms of rice, a record-breaking achievement. But in that moment, before the record was secured, the story was simpler: a woman standing before an impossible task, her faith steady and her hands sure. Her heart insisted that food could still do what it had always done in her mother’s kitchen — feed, connect, and transform.
To understand Hilda, you must first understand her mother, Lynda’s kitchen. It was there, long before Guinness records and international headlines, that food revealed its true power.
Her mother had migrated from Calabar to Abuja with little more than her skill. Cooking became both a livelihood and a bridge. “Food did a lot for my mum,” she recalls. “It built relationships, it made friends, it even resolved conflicts. When she migrated from Calabar to Abuja, food was what built everything we became. It sent us to school. It kept us afloat. From a very young age, I knew food could do more than fill stomachs — it could change lives.”
She often jokes that her mother’s pots were her first classroom, the ladle her first textbook. In them, she didn’t just learn recipes, but resilience. Watching her mother stretch one meal to feed many, or turn scarcity into flavour, she realised food was not only about survival but also dignity. That conviction became her inheritance.
Even now, she speaks of cooking not simply as a skill but as an inheritance, a language passed down through her mother’s hands. Her Ibibio heritage shaped her palate and her imagination. “Ibibio food is colourful, layered, unapologetic,” she says. “We use onions and peppers in ways that create endless possibilities. From one base, you can spin a thousand recipes. That’s where my love for African flavours started.” It is no accident that her restaurant, even as a fast food outlet, is rooted in that soil. “No matter what, there will always be African flavours on my menu. That’s my foundation.”
“Food was what built everything we became. It sent us to school. It kept us afloat.”
Her favourite dishes reflect that grounding: Afang soup, thick with greens, okro soups layered with seafood, and fisherman’s soup rich with depth. Coconut rice, fragrant and creamy — a recipe she can make “in her sleep.” And pasta — creamy, indulgent, endlessly adaptable. But beyond the recipes, there is tenderness. “If my partner likes something, that becomes my favourite for a while,” she admits with a smile. “I’ll cook it every day until he gets tired of it. For me, food is also love, expressed in repetition.”
When asked what underpins her confidence in food as a tool for connection, Hilda circles back to her academic roots. She studied sociology, a discipline that taught her to read people and patterns. “It made me solutions-driven,” she says. “It taught me to troubleshoot, whether in the kitchen, in business, or with people. It made me observant. I can tell what appeals to people, what will move them, and then I create around that.” Those lessons, half from textbooks and half from life, sharpened her instincts as a businesswoman and as a cultural force. “At its core, food is about people. Sociology taught me to understand them, and cooking taught me to love them.”
That blend of heritage and study, of mother and classroom, is the bedrock on which everything else stands. The audacity of world records, the discipline of running businesses, the tenderness of love — all of it traces back to a young girl in Abuja, watching her mother stir a pot, realising that food was never just food.
The first record was fire, raw and unrelenting. “I wanted to put my name on the map,” Hilda says plainly. “I wanted to change the trajectory of my family. I wanted something that would propel me to the next level.” For her, the Cookathon wasn’t just about food — it was about survival, ambition, a kind of daring that forces the world to look up.
In Nigeria’s culinary landscape, cooking had too often been dismissed as ordinary, invisible work. She wanted to shatter that. “People didn’t see cooking as glamorous or as an art that could be profitable. Some people had started to, but broadly, no. So I knew we needed something so audacious it would change perception in an instant. Like taking the elevator instead of climbing the stairs — one big leap.”
But ambition alone doesn’t win records. What the first attempt taught her was discipline. “I’m a big planner, but even then I realised you need more than plans. You need precision. You need a team that shares your vision. And you can’t do it in a hurry — every detail has to be nailed down.” The Guinness team made sure of that. “They are very strict. Zero tolerance for shortcuts. That forced us to sharpen up. If you want to play on that stage, you have to do it right.”
By the second record, she was armed with those lessons — but her fire had shifted shape. If the first was about proving herself, the second was about proving what was possible together. “The first was about me,” she says. “The second was about us. About community. About love.”
The scale was staggering: 8,700 kilograms of Jollof rice, 200 sacks of basmati, 600 cartons of tomato paste, an entire truck’s worth of seasoning cubes. Hundreds of hands — slicing, blending, stirring, marinating, hauling. “Even the prep was its own world,” Hilda recalls. “We took over my friend Bose’s entire facility for three days. She gave it to us for free. A hundred people, at different stages, working nonstop. Cutting onions until your eyes burn. Blending peppers by the barrel. Lifting sacks of rice that could break your back.”
“People think trusting God means waiting passively. For me, it’s the opposite. Faith is what makes me keep moving, keep planning, keep sweating, even when it hurts.”
She laughs at the absurdity of it. “We even had to do a dry run — 800 kilograms of rice. Two bags. And in that giant pot, it looked like grains of sand. That’s when I thought: wow, what are we really doing here?”
But that absurdity carried joy too. “You can’t put a monetary value on what people gave. Even if you paid them, it wouldn’t cover the heart they poured in. At some point, the work became personal for everyone. It wasn’t just my dream anymore — it was a shared dream. People wanted to see it happen. They wanted to be part of it.”
For Hilda, that spirit of shared effort goes back to childhood. She remembers her mother piling food onto a single tray for her siblings. “It was practical — fewer dishes to wash. But it also taught me something: when you eat together, there’s more. You get a piece of protein you might not have gotten if you were on your own. You stretch things further. You learn to share. That has never left me.” She pauses. “I think that’s why I’m drawn to community. When we come together, we can do what would take one person years — in months, in days.”
Faith, as much as ambition, fuels her. She doesn’t see God as a distant force but as a close collaborator. “My journey with God is like building a relationship. You get closer, you face things together, you learn to trust. Over time, the bond grows. That’s how I feel with Him. Even when I don’t know how to pray, He shows up.”
That faith transforms her endurance. “When I’m tired, I think about the joy I’ll feel when it’s done. That keeps me going. And I remind myself: if this isn’t physically impossible, then God still wants me to keep at it.” She credits her brother with that mantra. “He told me during the Cookathon: keep going until your body makes it impossible to continue. And if you’re still standing, it means God has given you the strength to go on.”
Of course, there were moments she thought her body had already reached that point — knees buckling, arms shaking, pots swallowing rice that seemed to multiply before her eyes. “But somehow,” she laughs, “God kept stretching me further. That’s the only explanation.”
For her, faith is not a way of avoiding the grind but a way of deepening it. “People think trusting God means waiting passively. For me, it’s the opposite. Faith is what makes me keep moving, keep planning, keep sweating, even when it hurts. Because I know I’m not carrying it alone.”
From personal ambition to communal faith, from endurance to abundance, from survival to grace — the fire has carried her across thresholds. And in her own words, it always returns to one truth: “Your life can change in 24 hours. You just need to trust God. He’s got you.”
For all the applause, Hilda knows that inspiration comes wrapped in contradiction. “When people say, ‘you inspire me’, it feels good,” she admits, “but sometimes it makes me uncomfortable too. I don’t always know how to react. I’m just like, oh my God — me? Really?” Yet she doesn’t dismiss it. Those words, even when they make her squirm, become fuel. “It motivates me to keep going, to keep doing the right thing. Because if my story can push somebody else to try harder, then I can’t take that lightly.”
Still, she’s not naïve about the shadow side. For every person who feels encouraged by her journey, there’s another who takes her success personally, as if it diminishes their own. “That’s the thing about being visible,” she says. “Some people will always ask: why her?”
And for women, she notes, the sneers take on a familiar shape. “People say things like, she must be with this man or that man,” Hilda shrugs. “It’s the normal thing they say when a woman is successful and also looks good. For some reason, they think if you’re driven and fashionable, it can’t just be you. There must be something else.”
“Honestly, Nigerians will give you character development on Instagram for free.”
Sometimes the misconceptions are laughable. “I once saw a comment where someone said, ‘the way this girl is looking, she looks like she might be wicked,’” she recalls, breaking into laughter. “Wicked! As if there’s no way you can be good at what you do without also having some kind of evil energy. People can be wild with their assumptions.”
She laughed until her stomach hurt that day, then shook her head. “Honestly, Nigerians will give you character development on Instagram for free,” she quips.
But humour aside, she recognises the deeper pattern. “It’s like people expect women to dim something about themselves so that it feels balanced — if you’re smart and successful, then maybe you’re not stylish, or if you’re stylish, maybe you’re not kind. And when you don’t fit into those boxes, they don’t know what to do with you.”
Her answer is simple: don’t wrestle with shadows. “I focus on what I can control,” she says with a calm finality. “My family, my love, my business. Those things keep me so busy that even if I wanted to dwell on the noise, there’s no time. My brother always tells me, focus on the things you can control. And that’s what I do.”
Behind the spotlight, Hilda’s world is grounded by blunt honesty and deep care. “My partner, my brother, my kid sister — they tell me the hardest truths,” she says. “They’re blunt, direct. And I need that.” Her wider team reflects the same ethos. “I don’t work with yes-men. If something doesn’t make sense, I’ll hear it. If I’m being a brat, they’ll tell me straight up: you’re being a brat.” She laughs, but only because she values it. “I pride myself on being teachable. You can’t grow if you’re not willing to listen.”
That honesty balances against the self-nurturing practices she’s cultivated. “Therapy,” she says without hesitation. “Talk therapy has been a huge part of my journey. Just being honest about how I feel, where I am mentally at any point — even if it’s embarrassing — helps me get the right advice and the right motivation.”
And then there are her rituals of softness, small acts that refill her cup. “Sometimes it’s lunch with a friend. Sometimes it’s just hanging out in my manager’s office, talking about plans. Other times, it’s a nap or a date with my man. Even something as simple as getting my nails done feels grounding.” She pauses, then smiles. “I also curate content that makes me feel beautiful. That’s a reminder to myself that yes — you’re still that girl.”
For Hilda, support is a dual practice: the tough love of truth-tellers around her, and the gentle self-soothing she extends inward. That balance — firmness and softness, correction and celebration — keeps her steady when the world outside tilts.
“I believe in creating the paradise you want.”
If the public eye sometimes distorts, love has been her place of clarity. “I don’t think about outside acceptance,” she says with conviction. “I believe in creating the paradise you want.” For her and her partner, that paradise is built on focus and mutuality. “We do our work, we come back to each other, and we’re there for each other. With us, there’s no pride.”
She has never felt the need to shrink herself in the relationship. “I don’t need to be smaller or pretend. I love him, I admire him, and I’m motivated by him. He’s so driven, so hardworking, so focused — watching him makes me more focused too. And he encourages me to keep my eyes on what’s important.”
Their rhythm, she says, is like a relay of applause. “We’re at similar stages in our lives, so it’s like: it’s your turn, I clap for you; it’s my turn, you clap for me. We’re both proud of each other. We’re growing, we’re learning. Not perfect, but learning every day.”
Faith, she adds, anchors them both. “God is between us,” she says. “That helps everything.” And then, with a laugh that slips into something softer, she sums it up in a single line: “Love is sweet. Very nice.”
If the cookathons and world records cemented Hilda as a cultural figure, her restaurants remind the world that she is also a businesswoman — one with clear eyes and steady instincts.
She laughs when asked what first motivated her to open a restaurant. “Honestly, I wanted to make money,” she admits without hesitation. But beneath the candour lies conviction. “In my house, the food has always been excellent. People would taste it and be shocked, like they had discovered something new. So I thought — why not share that on a larger scale?”
That spark has since become My Food by Hilda, a brand that carries not just her name but her ethos. Walking into the space is not only about eating; it is about stepping into an atmosphere carefully curated to feel familiar and generous. “I want you to feel warmth when you enter,” she says. “I want you to taste the love I apply to my craft. Whether you’re sitting down or ordering takeout, I need you to experience that. That’s why our tagline is “Made with Love”. Because I truly have so much love for my craft, for what I do — and I want you to feel it with every bite.”
But passion alone cannot sustain a business. Hilda has had to learn by doing, and sometimes by failing. “At the start, I didn’t fully understand marketing,” she recalls. “I thought word of mouth would be enough. I made missteps with ads, with influencers, and with how I presented the business. I had to learn how to assess what works for my kind of brand.”
“Food is my craft, but business is my backbone.”
The more famous she became, the trickier the balance grew. “When I suddenly became very popular, I realised people might come to the restaurant because of me — not because of the product. That’s dangerous for any brand. I had to figure out how to separate the business from myself. I wanted people to come because the food was excellent, not just because I was Hilda Baci.”
She is candid about the other hard lessons too. “Money is one of the most important things in business. If you’re not stable, you can’t survive. I’ve had to learn when to invest, when to expand, and when to pause. Every day, I’m still learning and growing.”
What comes through is not the voice of someone winging it, but of a woman who is deliberate, thoughtful, and unafraid to adapt. She reads books, tests strategies, reflects on errors, recalibrates. For her, mistakes are not failures but tuition.
And perhaps that is why, despite the glamour attached to her name, she insists on being seen as more than a celebrity chef. “Food is my craft,” she says with conviction, “but business is my backbone.”
Hilda laughs when she admits she never really imagined being 30. “Honestly, I don’t think I ever imagined it,” she says. “It seemed like an age that was so far away. Even the people I had around me weren’t 30. You know? So when I was sensible enough to even think of age, my mum was in her 30s. It felt so funny. As a child, I just couldn’t picture myself there. Does that make me sound unserious?”
She grins, but the reflection quickly deepens. “Now that I’m here, I’m very excited. I thought I’d be more terrified, but actually, I feel grown. Very grown. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m excited for the more lessons that will come with this new age. I’m looking forward to where God is taking me next, because honestly, I didn’t even know I was going to get here this way, at this age. I’m letting go of too much planning, too many expectations. Of course, I still have my goals, but I’m also very grateful. I’m grateful and excited.”
Her voice softens as she compares herself at 25 and 30. “Five years ago, I didn’t value myself this much. But now? I take myself more seriously. I enjoy myself more. And not just in the sense of going out or buying things — no, I mean I genuinely like my own company. I enjoy thinking with myself, conversing with myself, and spending time with myself. I like myself more. I like who I am now. And I’m excited for who I’m becoming.”
“Five years ago, I didn’t value myself this much. But now? I take myself more seriously.”
She admits there were seasons where she doubted she’d make it this far, not because of ability but because of the sheer uncertainty of life. “So many things felt unpredictable. There were times I wondered if the road would simply stop. But now, every birthday feels like proof — proof of grace, proof that discipline pays off, proof that joy is worth pursuing even when the road is unclear.”
If she could whisper to her younger self, she would be tender but sure. “I’d say: girl, you have nothing to worry about. You’re going to blow, and you’ll probably do it before 30. All those dreams you had of being known, of making it — they’ll happen. And you’ll enjoy every stage along the way, even the times you cry or wish things were different. It will all make sense.”
And perhaps the greatest surprise is how unapologetic she has become. “When I was younger, I was such a people pleaser. I always wanted everyone to like me. But now? I don’t even want that anymore. I’ve accepted that not everybody can understand me — and that’s okay. I think of myself as exclusive, like the limited edition you can’t just find everywhere.” She chuckles at the image but stands firm in the truth of it. “15-year-old me would be so shocked. She would be looking at me now and say, ‘That’s the girl I wanted to be.’”
Her words are not a boast but a relief. To arrive at 30 not with fear but with freedom, not with restlessness but with rootedness, is itself a kind of record — one not written in Guinness books but etched quietly into the woman she has become.
The image of that giant pot of Jollof lingers — not for its record-breaking weight, but for what it represents. At its core, it was no different from the tray her mother once set before her children: a shared dish, a shared joy, proof that when people come together, something larger than themselves is created.
At 30, with two Guinness World Records, thriving businesses, and a legacy still in motion, Hilda Baci is more than her milestones. She is the daughter of Ibibio soil, where peppers and onions birthed endless possibilities. She is a sociologist who reads people as easily as recipes. She is the woman of faith who laughs at life’s absurdities and still insists, “God’s got me.” She is the partner who claps loudly for her love and expects the same applause in return.
And she is, perhaps most powerfully, a storyteller whose medium is flavour — a woman who knows that food can be a punchline, a balm, a business plan, a prayer. Her humour keeps her light, her thoughtfulness keeps her grounded, and together they give her life its texture.
She jokes that no Guinness plaque can compete with the memory of laughing with her team over a pot taller than most of them. But beneath the joke lies her truth: community is the greatest record of all.
Her greatest recipe is not measured in cartons of rice or 600 tins of tomatoes, but in fire and faith, in endurance and laughter, in the belief that food — like life — is best when made with love.
