Restaurants are not just made up of the formal dine-in varieties, but also include the informal mabati structured vibandas where many blue collar workers also partake their daily meals.
These add to the thousands of dining establishments that need meat, potatoes, tomatoes, onions and other myriad raw ingredients which make up the food value chain that ends up at the end of the proverbial fork.
The negative economic contagion on farmers countrywide means that the Covid-19 impact is far reaching beyond the urban lockdowns and curfews that we see with the naked eye.
A husband and wife were dining at a 5-star restaurant. When their food arrived, the husband said: “Our food has arrived! Let’s eat!” His wife reminded him: “Honey, you always say your prayers at home before your dinner!” Her husband replied: “That’s at home, my dear. Here the chef knows how to cook…”
Towards the tail end of last month, the National Emergency Response Committee on Coronavirus approved and issued a set of guidelines for the partial reopening of restaurants and eateries following a directive by the President on the same. Watching from the sidelines of an organisation that runs a restaurant, it has been amazing to see the various iterations that the guidelines have been through in the short two weeks since the initial announcement which has caused massive confusion and costs to restaurant owners.
An even more illuminating discourse began on Kenyan social media on the demerits of opening up eating establishments with folks loudly wondering, in misplaced righteous indignation, whether the government really knew what it was doing.
I reached out to a chief executive of a chain of restaurants to get the back story on why the government would select the restaurant industry for relaxation of lockdown restrictions and he opened my eyes on the invisible-to-the-naked-social-media-eye value chain that exists from farm to fork. He gave me an example of a long standing supplier of pre-cut potato chips to the restaurant. The lady, who shall go by the name of Mary for purposes of this piece, has been supplying potatoes to restaurants for the last 20 years.
Mary started off by buying potatoes in bulk at Nairobi’s wholesale vegetable mart, Wakulima Market, and her entrepreneurial skills were borne as she realised that she could undertake backward integration by planting the potatoes herself. Twenty years later, she has over 300 acres in Naivasha, undertaking large scale rotational vegetable production using pivot irrigation. She transports her potato harvests to her processing plant in Nairobi where she peels and cuts the potatoes into chips for sale to various restaurant chains. She hires hundreds of casual labourers during harvest time and last month, in April, had to plough back 300 acres of potatoes into the soil as compost.
Mary had to make this painful decision for two reasons: firstly, she couldn’t get the casual labourers to help in the harvest due to travel constraints following travel restrictions, as the labourers only came into Naivasha during harvest time and secondly, the demand for chips had dried up significantly following the reduction of sales in most restaurants. At about two tonnes per acre, those are 600 tonnes of potatoes that were reduced to compost at the turn of a plough!
The CEO then gave me insights into the milk industry. Between hearty servings of tea and coffee, milk products are also used in the restaurant industry in the form of cheese for burgers, pizzas and salads as well as ice-cream and yoghurt. His particular chain of restaurants typically used 400 litres of milk a day, and his larger competitor, with 62 branches, used about 105 litres a day per branch making for a total of 6,510 litres daily. This is not counting the additional milk required for the daily ice cream and yoghurt consumption. So if just two restaurant chains are seeing a drop of almost 7,000 litres of milk daily, imagine the impact on the dairy farmers whose cows continue to produce milk daily with nowhere other than the drain to pour out the milk to. You see, the retail milk market does not have the capacity to absorb all this extra product as there’s only so much milk the individual can consume at home.
Restaurants are not just made up of the formal dine-in varieties, but also include the informal mabati structured vibandas where many blue collar workers also partake their daily meals. These add to the thousands of dining establishments that need meat, potatoes, tomatoes, onions and other myriad raw ingredients which make up the food value chain that ends up at the end of the proverbial fork.
The negative economic contagion on farmers countrywide means that the Covid-19 impact is far reaching beyond the urban lockdowns and curfews that we see with the naked eye. So before one postulates yet another insipid conspiracy about which fat cat manufacturer the government is protecting by trying to reopen the restaurant industry, do the potato math. As James Carville expressed during the Bill Clinton 1992 presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid!”
