- Demand at home for the beans is rising, as newly minted members of the urban middle class develop a taste for specialty coffee.
- Kenya has been known globally for its quality coffee over the years, but mismanagement and low returns have seen the sector lose its value.
Image: REUTERS
Kenyan butcher David Mwangi likes to start his day with a mocha or a cappuccino at a newly opened coffee shop in his area - the first such outlet in a farming town where a sweet, milky cup of tea is the way most people start the day.
"Coffee helps my mind to wake up. The taste is sweet," the 27-year-old said, while sipping the beverage at the outlet owned by Kilele Coffee Company in Karatina town, which is about 120 kilometres from the capital, Nairobi.
The small coffee chain, which has six outlets in central Kenya, was founded last year by Joshua Kariuki, who returned home to Nyeri town after 15 years as an aid worker, including in South Sudan.
He hopes Kilele will add profit and value for local farmers as it relies on them for the supply of raw coffee.
"We want to have a coffee drinking culture at the local level," Kariuki said.
A booming domestic market could nurture a new generation of farmers in a flagging industry, said Matthew Harrison, an Amsterdam-based buyer at specialty coffee sourcing company Trabocca.
Kenya has been known globally for its quality coffee over the years, but mismanagement and low returns have seen the sector lose its value.
According to the latest Commodity Markets Outlook by the World Bank, the country's coffee production dropped 35 per cent in the last 50 years as farmers kept off the crop.
In 1970, the country used to sell almost a million 60kg bags of coffee, in the 1980s this hit more than 1.5million bags and the commodity was one of the country's top foreign exchange earners.
Kenyan coffee now accounts for just 1 per cent of the global crop, but its high-quality arabica beans are sought after by roasters for blending with other varieties.
Demand at home for the beans is rising, as newly minted members of the urban middle class and even those in the countryside develop a taste for specialty coffee.
Kenyans consume just 5 per cent of total output, compared with neighbouring Ethiopia, where domestic consumption accounts for nearly half of production, thanks to a strong coffee drinking culture.
But the local consumption in Kenya has tripled to 1,500 metric tonnes per year in the past decade, figures from the global business data portal, Statista, showed.
That benefits farmers like Thuo Mathenge, who closed his medical business in the Kenyan capital Nairobi to return to his village a decade ago.
He now processes beans from his sprawling coffee farm at the base of Mount Kenya and sells the product in his retail outlets.
Mathenge attributed the rise in Kenyan coffee culture to the growing knowledge of the beverage's potential benefits, including triggering alertness and boosting energy.
He produces more than 50 tonnes of coffee a year, and the proportion of the coffee he sells locally has doubled to 60 per cent from 30 per cent seven years ago. The rest goes to the United States, Britain and Belgium.
His organically grown, processed coffee fetches Sh2,000 a kilo, compared with the less than Sh100 that most small-scale farmers in the area get for their raw coffee abroad, thanks to the fact that he does not use chemicals in growing.
"Coffee is gold," he said, adding that he is planting more coffee trees on a separate 20 acre piece of land.
REFORMS
Meanwhile various reforms have been put in place in the sector through the Coffee Bill 2021, and this is seemingly bringing back the commodity's lost glory.
The reforms have rescued smallholder farmer from the yoke of cartels, right from the local factory level, all the way to the coffee auction.
The coffee farmers are now getting better earnings from their hardwork.
Data from the Nairobi Coffee Exchange shows coffee prices at the auction opened 2021 on a high note.
A 50-kilogramme bag fetched Sh35,970 in January from Sh34,000 recorded in the last sale of 2020.
This saw coffee earnings grow by 92 per cent at the end of February 2021 compared with the corresponding month last year.
The crop earned Kenya Sh8.7 billion in February, up from Sh4.5 billion that was realised in the same time last year.
In the reforms, President Uhuru also established a $30 million dollar revolving fund to cushion the over 700,000 small-holder coffee farmers from bottlenecks, which include delayed payments and high cost of production.
The Ministry of Agriculture in a bid to reduce processing losses has installed digital weighing scales for accurate readings, built modern drying benches and alarms installed to curb rising coffee theft.
Kenya has one of the best coffees in the world, highly sought by roasters for blending with lower quality beans from other regions.