Kenya is moving to place its tea in some of the most exclusive markets in the world, with Equity Group chief executive Dr James Mwangi announcing that Murang'a tea will now be available in high-end establishments in Paris. The plan is framed as a way to win far better value for the country's small-scale tea farmers, who have long earned little from the crop.
Mwangi said the lender has been built on the back of about 400,000 tea farmers, and that it had chosen to pay back by transforming their lives and livelihoods. The strategy, he explained, is to work with those farmers and seek out niche markets all over the world rather than continuing to sell into a crowded commodity trade.
At the centre of the effort is a deal in Europe. According to Mwangi, Equity has partnered with the largest seller of tea on the continent, a company with 151 shops across Europe, and has asked it to stock Kenyan tea. Securing a market, he noted, is a separate challenge from producing the tea in the first place.
He argued that the timing is favourable because Europe is going through a transition and has become very sensitive to teas that are sprayed and carry chemical residues. Kenyan tea, he said, has no chemical residues, which he believes puts the country in a position to capture the entire European market by seizing the moment.
For Mwangi, the deeper problem is that Kenyan tea has been sold as a mass-market commodity rather than a differentiated product. The greatest value, he said, lies in the branding and the narrative told about the tea, how it is produced and the conditions behind it, which builds loyalty among consumers who feel they are drinking something unique.
That distinction, he argued, is the key to raising incomes without simply growing more tea. The country may never be able to increase quantity, but it can improve quality and increase the price exponentially, an approach tied to selling the story of the tea rather than treating it as scarce mass production.
Mwangi underlined the stakes with his own story. He recalled that when he was 12, helping his mother pick tea in Nyaratogo village, she received two dollars, and that 50 years later he is still receiving two dollars despite decades of inflation. Farmers are now struggling to educate their children, he said, because the value has been lost, and changing that is the gist of the entire effort.