Investor finds business is juicier than politics

Kevian Kenya proprietors Kimani Rugendo with his wife Helen Kimani. Courtesy photos

For many years, Kimani Rugendo was associated with Nairobi politics more than business.

After trying unsuccessfully to win a parliamentary seat, Mr Rugendo opted to focus on his family business as its managing director.
During his days as a politician, he had been identified with the struggle for political pluralism in the late 1980s, but today Mr Rugendo is a prominent businessman.

In 1992, after failing to capture the Lang’ata parliamentary seat, he set out to build his company, Kevian Kenya whose first product was drinking water — Mt Kenyan. The company targeted Mombasa tourist hotels as its main market with limited supply of the product to a few restaurants and supermarkets in Nairobi. At the time, mineral water was not yet popular with consumers in the city.

However, the 1999 Likoni clashes slowed down the tourism industry at the Coast affecting the mineral water business adversely.

“We had been thinking and we became more serious focusing on what to do next. We had to look for something that is not for a niche market,” says general manager Helen Kimani, who is also Mr Rugendo’s wife. “We looked at what we had and the raw material we had was water.”

This got the company thinking on how it would add value to the water. That was 10 years ago and today, Kevian has since transformed itself into a whole fruit juice company with two plants, one on Ngong Road and the other in Thika, established in 2005. It also launched two strong juice brands — Pick ‘N’ Peel and Afia.

Before she joined her husband to manage the family business, the Kevian Kenya general manager was a civil servant. However, she resigned from her job to pursue business full-time. She ran her own businesses including Sterling Craft, which is still in operation.

“I learnt not to fear. If you really focus on something and believe in it, it will work,” she says.

After a survey, they discovered a big difference between local juices and those offered in other markets. The supermarket shelves were dominated with squash — juice made from artificial fruit flavours and colourings. As a mother of two, she could not give her sons these juices since they did not have any nutritional value. The market research confirmed that there was plenty of room for whole fruit juices despite imports from South Africa and Europe.

Together with a multinational company Kevian Kenya had been dealing with, they ventured into whole fruit juice production, becoming the first local company to package the product in Tetra Pak.

“Like any business person at that time, we are trying something that had not been done before. It was really a gamble,” says Ms Kimani.

The company took a risk with the introduction of the Pick ‘N’ Peel brand, which the market embraced and it is currently sold across the region including Democratic Republic of Congo.

Two years later, they went back to their original idea of packaging whole fruit juices in plastic. This gave birth to the Afia brand whose journey began in a plastic cup. But six months later Kevian Kenya switched to plastic bottles. However, both materials were not suitable for the real fruit juice because they interfered with its taste and colour.

In 2004, the company changed the packaging of Afia to PET bottles, rebranded it and the product started flying off the shelves.

Consumer demands

Recently, the company gave Pick ‘N’ Peel a face lift — slim cap — in response to changing consumer demands.

Farmers or contracted suppliers deliver the fruits for processing the juice products. However, since it expanded, the company is working to establish a direct link with the farmers. “Before it was a challenge, because we had a small production capacity. At the end of last year, we completed an ultra modern production line,” says Ms Kimani.

She says that consumers like to experiment with new products, but they want quality. “Contrary to believe, Kenyans are very supportive of local brands,” adds Ms Kimani.

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