Success at a young age often comes with a hidden cost. For Brian Kiribwa, that tax was a lifestyle that threatened to outpace his professional growth.
“I was making decisions that would have easily destroyed me,” says the 33-year-old. He was caught up in the folly of “partying as hard as I worked.”
At the time, Kiribwa was running a business in Pennsylvania, United States. Then, just before the Covid-19 pandemic six years ago, he realised high operational costs were stifling the profits.
He made the life-changing decision to shut down his business, Royal Lioness, and relocate to Kenya, arriving in Nairobi just before the declaration of the global Covid-19 emergency.
Soon after settling in, he saw a business opportunity.
“I started importing masks and thermometers at a time when few people were doing it. Having enough stock in the early days of the public health emergency meant that I had a rare supply, which worked to my advantage.”
Even as a successful entrepreneur in America, Mr Kiribwa had envisioned starting a business in Kenya.
“Many Kenyans living abroad will tell you that they want to invest in the motherland. The challenges are time and processes. Being in Kenya, I had the time, and I could handle the processes quite easily compared to doing it via proxies.”
He was leaning toward manufacturing alcoholic beverages. “While I was in the States, I had a microbrewery at home where I made alcohol for my friends at parties. I took my savings, imported Sh1 million equipment from China, and set up base in a servant’s quarters in Lang'ata. I then started producing gins and fruit-extract-infused beers.”
Mr Kiribwa blames the tough regulatory regime, especially for start-ups in the industry, for the business’s failure to take off.
“I was spending a lot of money acquiring licences and pushing my products to achieve standardisation. For a start-up, cash flow is a survival strategy, so it became difficult to keep reinvesting,” he says.
Some of the various flavors of Handas Juice made by Handas Juice Limited on February 20, 2026.
Photo credit: Francis Nderitu | Nation Media Group
Between the cost of the machinery and the endless overheads he incurred while navigating Kenya's bureaucracy, the money disappeared.
“I ended up broke. The machines were sitting idle in our small brewery. I had the technology to produce something, but no capital. I was back at square one, but with the added weight of a failed major investment.
Next big thing
Mr Kiribwa’s next big idea came from a conversation he had with a friend.
“I would invite him to join us at clubs for drinks and socialising, but he would insist that he was content at a ‘base’, a communal space where men (and increasingly women) gather for hours to chew khat or muguka.”
Mr Kiribwa decided to try it out, but he found the experience tedious.
“Chewing for six to eight hours did not make any sense to me. It was a painfully time-consuming process for a result that could be achieved much faster.”
He asked his friend the question that would form the backbone of his business: “Why are we chewing the leaves when all we want is the juice inside them? Why hasn’t anyone just extracted the juice and put it in a bottle?”
These questions are what birthed Handas Juice.
“Handas is an urban term for miraa (khat). We intend to have many products under this brand, but at some point, we may have to change the name. For now, though, we trade under that name, and we have about five products under the company,” says the entrepreneur.
Their most popular product is Jaba Juice, which is simply blended khat.
Making of an accidental engineer
Mr Kiribwa began his product research and development from his base in Lang’ata. He was a one-man laboratory. He initially used the remnants of his alcohol machinery, but quickly found that they were not up to the task. Standard industrial blenders, which are designed for blending fruits and soft vegetables, would burn out within 48 hours when blending the woody stalks of the khat plant.
Handas Juice Limited founder Brian Kiribwa poses during an interview on February 20, 2026.
Photo credit: Francis Nderitu | Nation Media Group
That’s how he became an accidental engineer. He started custom-building his own equipment and modifying existing machines to create ‘super-blenders’ that could pulverise the raw material without overheating.
“If you walk into my facility today, you’ll see machines that you won’t find anywhere else,” he says. “They are custom-made because the global manufacturing market doesn’t have a “Jaba Juice” section yet. We had to build the infrastructure as we built the brand.”
Despite investing time in in-depth research into miraa and how to extract the juice, Mr Kiribwa’s journey began with ‘productive naivety’. Had he known how difficult it was to extract the active alkaloids from khat and keep them shelf-stable, he might never have started.
“Khat contains cathinone, a stimulant that is very unstable. Once the leaf is harvested, the cathinone begins to break down into cathine, which is less potent. Furthermore, the leaf is incredibly fibrous and has an off-putting ‘grassy’ flavour,” he explains.
Scaling the business
When he started, Mr Kiribwa was the CEO, the chemist and the delivery driver. He would spend his nights extracting the juice and his days delivering 40 to 50 bottles to early adopters who had heard about the ‘bottled jaba’ through word of mouth and social media.
The product took off quickly. His market stretched from regular chewers to new clients who had never chewed miraa before.
Handas Juice’s steady organic growth has transformed the company from a backyard experiment into a large-scale industrial operation. Mr Kiribwa now manages a workforce of over 50 people. This team comprises a specialised production department, a quality control laboratory, administrative staff and a fleet of distributors.
The facility now processes between 200 and 250 kilogrammes of raw miraa every day to keep up with demand, having increased its production from 50 bottles a day.
A 500ml bottle ranges between Sh450 to Sh1,000, depending on potency.
Mr Kiribwa has established direct, strategic relationships with farmers in Maua and Murang’a. “This move has helped us bypass traditional middlemen to ensure the leaves are as fresh and potent as possible while providing a stable, predictable income for hundreds of farming families.”
Handas Juice made by Handas Juice Limited on February 20, 2026.
Photo credit: Francis Nderitu | Nation Media Group
He views his product as belonging to the “functional beverage” industry — a global market currently dominated by energy drinks.
“We classify this as a psychoactive substance, much like caffeine. While caffeine blocks adenosine receptors to stop you from feeling tired, the alkaloids in our juice stimulate dopamine and norepinephrine. It’s about energy, yes, but more importantly, it’s about focus,” he says.
The challenges
Mr Kiribwa admits that standardisation is still a challenge as National Authority for the Campaign Against Alcohol and Drug Abuse, the Kenya Revenue Authority and the Ministry of Health seem not to have a consensus on where to classify miraa.
As a producer, he runs on the goodwill of the Crop Act 2013 that recognises miraa as a scheduled cash crop.
He is also an advocate for responsible consumption. The product is strictly for those aged 18 and over, and he says he has worked tirelessly to make the branding more professional.
“Gone are the days of jaba being sold in ‘dingy basements’ in unlabelled plastic bags. Handas Juice comes in sleek, branded bottles with professional labelling, signalling to consumers that it is a product of modern manufacturing,” he says.
Export demand
The success of Handas Juice has already begun to have an impact beyond Kenya’s borders. Although the company is focused on the local market, the ‘diaspora’ effect of the product is already evident.
Third-party distributors are moving cases into Uganda and Somalia, where khat consumption is a multi-million-dollar industry that remains largely unindustrialised.
He sees a future where Handas is a household name across the continent, offering a range of beverages derived from indigenous African plants. He is currently researching other natural stimulants and ‘mood enhancers’ found in African botany that have been overlooked by major global pharmaceutical and beverage companies.
