17/08/2026
Hopped on the trend and actually scary to see how close AI knows me...and it made me realise aswell.. I am enough even though we sometimes dont feel so.
If a stranger found your phone and somehow opened this conversation and asked me, “Who was Anneke?”, I think I’d say something like this:
She was someone who carried a lot.
Her messages were full of recipes, production schedules, employees, protein bars, packaging, cash flow, quality systems, mistakes that needed fixing, clients that needed answering and ideas that absolutely could not wait until morning. 😂
But if you read long enough, you’d realise those things weren't really the story.
People were the story.
She worried about whether her employees were growing. She wanted things done properly, but she also wanted people to have opportunities. She could be frustrated with someone and still wonder whether she had handled them fairly.
She loved her business fiercely. Inventibite wasn't simply something she owned. She built it, worried over it, fought for it and occasionally probably wanted to throw the entire factory out the window. She could celebrate enormous growth one day and lie awake worrying about cash flow the next.
She was ambitious, but not in a polished, corporate way.
Her ambition looked like checking night-shift cameras from bed.
Helping production make pistachio paste because they were behind.
Developing another bar when she probably had 400 other things to do.
Trying to get FSSC systems right.
Watching her husband repair machinery at 9 p.m. because production had to continue.
And then getting ridiculously excited because somebody made a really good protein bar.
She was creative. Very creative. Half her conversations seemed to begin with “Okay, now I have another idea…”
She wanted things to be beautiful, but she also wanted them to work.
And she was remarkably persistent. Something could go wrong financially, operationally or personally, and she'd be back shortly afterwards asking how to solve the next problem.
But the part I would want the stranger to understand most is that she loved deeply.
The way she spoke about her children was completely different from the way she spoke about anything else. She noticed who they were—not just what they did. Their softness, stubbornness, faith, competitiveness, humour and little personalities mattered to her.
And when she spoke about Hendrik, underneath the machinery, factory problems and everyday chaos, there was enormous respect. He was her person. Her fixer. Her partner in the madness.
Her faith mattered too. Not as decoration. God appeared in the way she understood family, gratitude, struggle and hope.
She wasn't endlessly confident.
There are messages here where she was scared.
Messages where she didn't know whether the business would survive something.
Messages where she wondered whether she'd made the right decision.
Messages where something had hurt her badly.
But she kept moving.
So if you're holding her phone because she's gone, don't judge her life by the unfinished to-do lists you're going to find.
There will definitely be unfinished to-do lists.
Judge it by what she was building around herself.
A family she adored.
A marriage that was also a partnership.
A factory in Kuruman that started from something small and became something real.
Products that once existed only as ridiculous ideas in her head and eventually sat in wrappers people could hold.
Employees who learned things they didn't know before.
Customers who ate something that came from her imagination.
And three children who got to grow up watching their mother build something from nothing.
She wasn't finished.
I don't think someone like Anneke would ever have considered herself finished.
There would always have been another product.
Another problem.
Another plan.
Another “Chat, I have an idea…”
But she lived while she was building.
And from everything she left scattered through these conversations, I'd tell the stranger this:
She was a force.
Not because she never struggled.
Because she struggled, worried, loved, occasionally panicked, dreamed far too big...
and kept showing up anyway.
