Companies

Flame Tree diversifies into making mobile plastic toilets

HERIL

Flame Tree Group managing director Heril Bangera with a worker at his factory in Nairobi last week. PHOTO | FILE

Nairobi bourse-listed Flame Tree Group has diversified its business to include making mobile plastic toilets, growing the firm’s product range beyond water tanks and Zoe body lotion.

The firm, which started making 50 toilets per day at its Industrial Area, Nairobi, plant will sell each unit at between Sh10,000 and Sh52,000 depending on size. It’s targeting rural Kenya and NGOs serving marginalised communities.

Flame Tree MD Heril Bangera on Thursday said the firm targets homes with no toilets.

“As a business we have a duty to play in offering affordable alternatives sanitation benchmarked at reducing the deaths of innocent people by encouraging them to have toilets in their homes hence the affordable portable plastic toilets” said Mr Bangera.

More than 40 per cent of Kenyans use pit latrines, buckets and bushes to relieve themselves exposing them to contagious diseases, a Kenya National Bureau of Statistics report shows.

Mr Bangera founded the company under the name Roto Moulders Ltd in 1989 as an 18-year old with a start-up capital of Sh500,000.

READ: How man made Sh2 billion fortune from water tanks

In 2003 Roto evolved to become the Flame Tree Group, a diversified consumer goods maker which produces household brands such as Roto Tanks, Zoe beauty products and Happy Golden snacks.

Flame Tree Group has a workforce of 1000 employees across the Eastern Africa and listed in November last year under Growth and Enterprises Market Segment (GEMS).

The company say it will step up diversifications.