In a factory in Baba Dogo, Nairobi, Alexandra Chappatte, CEO and founder of Kenya Originals (KO), is holed up in one of the offices, headphones over her ears as she works on her laptop.
On the other side of the building, hundreds of boxes of fresh, ripe pineapples are being unloaded from a truck into the distillery. A young woman in a white apron paces the distillery, sniffing a stolzle glass every few seconds.
She is the master distiller, and today she is making gin. Someone is supervising the cleaning of empty brown bottles before they are filled with drinks.
A few steps away, five young men are putting labels on finished products. Everyone seems to know what they’re doing because there’s no supervision, just a buzz of activity.
Ms Chappatte, who is married to former Jumia CEO Sam Chappatte, recently expanded the Kenyan brand into Uganda having raised $2 million (Sh258 million) in funding for the expansion.
Phoenix Beverages, a Mauritius-based brewer, spearheaded the fund drive after acquiring a minority stake in the company, which trades as African Originals outside Kenya’s borders.
Sweet alternative to beer
After several years working as head of Marketing for West Africa in the world’s second-largest wine and spirits distributor, Pernod Ricard, the British-Belgian citizen found her way to Kenya and was inspired by the Kikuyu traditional muratina brew to start a company that would craft beverages that were alternative to beer using locally sources ingredients.
“When I worked for Pernod Ricard in West Africa, I realised there were no quality local beverage options to beer. I observed the same thing when I moved here, there were a lot of low-end mass-market brands and a lot of expensive imported ones. The beer market was saturated with alternatives and it was impossible to find a quality tasty affordable drink that was not beer,” explains Ms Chappatte.
“And therefore we have created a category of products that is not beer. We don’t want to touch beer, it’s very saturated in Kenya and its needs are well met. However, ciders which make up the largest chunk of our portfolio, are in 200 percent growth, which we attribute to ourselves and other players as well such as women who are the highest consumers of ciders. There is also the aspect of preference where we have observed people in general switching from beer to cider and spirits because they feel kind of bloated with beer but also the fact that a majority of Kenyans have sweet palate.”
Alex, as her colleagues call her, founded Kenya Originals in 2018 to craft ciders, gins, iced teas and mixers from real fruits locally grown. Alex and Chandaria Capital provided the initial seed funding for the company.
“A majority of our botanicals are sourced locally. The reason why we are using real fruits is because we noticed there is a gap in the market, a lot of fruits go to waste. We use everything. For example, right now we are in the mango season, and you will find out that 70 percent of mangoes produced go to waste. So we are trying to curb that by collaborating with various farmers in the country so that we get these fruits from their strongholds. We fetch our mangoes from Makueni, pineapple from Thika, lime from Garissa, passion fruit from Uasin Gishu and so on.” she adds.
In 2024, the brand paid Sh53 million to farmers for fruits.
What is left as waste from crafting the beverages is converted into manure. Ms Chappatte says that in future, the company is looking to start a fragrance line to utilise the essential oils from the fruits.
The Baba Dogo plant processes more than three metric tonnes of fruit monthly with a production capacity of 2,000 bottles daily.
“For example, for our 58 gin (named after the Buruburu matatu route) it has five main ingredients Juniper berries, baobab (mabuyu), ground nuts, mint and ginger. The process is that once we obtain the neutral vapour spirit, we infuse it with the flavours from the essential oils from the botanicals. Then gin is distilled five times making it refined, pure and of quality”.
Alex claims the use of real fruits and botanicals has given KO an edge in the market.
“What makes us unique in this market is that no other brewer has the formula and uses fresh fruits. That gives us an edge in the market. As underdogs, we have also grown exponentially because of our ability to innovate and have differentiated products in the market. We are not competing with the giants and that has been a plus for us.”
The Kenya alcoholic drinks market reached a valuation of Sh150 billion in 2023, according to Trace Data research and Sh425 billion as of 2025 according to Statista.
According to KO market research, affluent Kenyan males have contributed to these figures by tremendously driving the growth of gin consumption in Kenya.
White spirits are growing across all demographics. Even though Vodka is the dominant white spirit owing to the high-energy party space for spirits, Gin is displaying sustained long-term growth.
White spirits lead over brown but mass consumers struggle to distinguish the white spirits category. That said, beer still claims the lion’s share in the Kenyan alcohol market at 62 percent consumption, while spirits are at 35 percent and wine four percent.
However, since 2019 there has been a decline in beer sales by 12 percent while spirits have risen to 53 percent and ciders 200 percent.
“There is a big market for alcohol in Kenya. The market we are playing is around $400 million (Sh52 billion) in size,” says Alex, projecting that her company will be generating $25 million (Sh3.2 billion) annually by 2026.
In 2024, the brand generated $7 million (Sh900 million) in revenue with the firm projecting to generate three times the revenue of $21 million (Sh2.7 billion) by the end of this year.
Alex observes Kenya is a partying nation compared to most countries in Africa and Europe.
“You people might think it’s normal but 74 percent of alcohol sales in Kenya are on-premise isn’t. To give you context with the UK, its 20 percent sales on-premise. So that tells you Kenya is a partying nation. Kenyans prefer being out enjoying their drink with other people compared to in-home which is the major trend in Europe.”
When Alex moved to Kenya seven years ago, what she fell in love with was the modern culture being advanced by the youth.
“There were so many awesome things about modern Kenyan culture that no one was celebrating. This was different from my experience in West Africa where people beat the drums all the time about what it is like to be Nigerian or Ghanaian. I saw an opportunity to start and build a brand that would help celebrate the modern Kenyan identity other than the classic Maasai. A brand that resonated with this culture fronted by the mavericks of Nairobi who are pushing the boundaries of what Kenyan youth is all about. This explains why 80 percent of our staff are under 35. Our 58 Gin is named after Buruburu matatus”.
On the right, Kenya Originals founder Alexandra Chappatte is served by one of her employees at the company's mini-bar at the Baba Dogo processing plant in Nairobi.
Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group
A majority of KO staff are women and Alex says that is not informed by the fact that she is a woman, but rather because women are naturally more gifted marketers than men.
“Selling a new product is hard. One needs a great team and I think women are a little bit more convincing. Our workforce is 57 percent women,” she says.
Although the company is now sailing smoothly, there have been some rough tides along the way.
As a woman in the Kenyan manufacturing sector, Ms Chappatte says the main obstacle was setting up the business in Kenya during its infancy.
“Fortunately, Kenya has a strong female leadership in the manufacturing and service sector and that helped me enter the market as a new brand. However, setting up the business was the major challenge because things here take quite some time to be approved. The process is super sluggish, and the costs are quite expensive. Getting all the licenses that we needed took months.”
But even once the business was in operation with ciders as the first product, getting it listed in major stores was another hurdle. Alex observes that opting to go for direct distribution rather than working with known distributors, for cost-cutting and ensuring that their prices remained competitive was a huge challenge.
“In this country, it is very hard to work with distributors when you are a small brand because your product will not get off the truck. We had to set up our distribution and that’s how we have been able to break that barrier.
We sold the first KO product, a cider in December 2018 at the Blankets & Wine Festival because it represented the brand's target market.
“We then offered our first listing to several bars in Nairobi and then got listed with major supermarkets. Honestly, it was difficult to get supermarkets to pick our product line because this was a unique alternative to the beverages that the markets were accustomed to. The supermarkets were sceptical about the brand moving, it took a lot of time and effort to win the supermarkets' trust and confidence in our products.”
Tax burden
Last year the treasury introduced new excise plans for alcoholic products taxing beverages on alcohol–by–volume (ABV) departing from the previous method where a specific tax was levied depending on the type of beverage.
ABV is a metric used to determine the alcohol content in a beverage showing the total volume of what is pure alcohol. Alex does admit this has had implications for the KO brand.
“How this has impacted us as Kenya Originals is that spirit products which, we have quite a range of, are differentiated based on ABV (alcohol content in a bottle). So, for our product with an ABV of 45 per cent, we are paying Sh524 per bottle up from Sh364. This leaves us with three options: one is whether we pass the same to the consumer who will see the price of the product rise or rework the ABV of the product by lowering it maintaining the product price or three, taking up the cost leading to a decrease in our profit margins.”
For the Gin and Tonic products, the brand has lowered the ABV from 8 per cent to 5 per cent to enjoy the differential tax rates.
“In general, if you are a small brewer (producing less than 150,000 litres per month) you get to enjoy this new tax plan because if you were paying an exercise duty of Sh5 million per month, that amount drops by almost a half with the new tariffs.”
The most affected KO product is the ciders which is the largest portfolio of the brand and fast moving.
“For ciders, we used to pay Sh47 per bottle now we are paying Sh59 for a bottle. The Sh12 difference makes a big difference in the margins.”
With the government always targeting alcohol manufacturers in annual tax reviews, Alex says they have learnt to cushion the business in advance.
“In our plans for every year, we always anticipate the exercise duty will go up and so we try as much as possible to cushion ourselves when drawing the new year plan because it’s very unpredictable.”
