Smallholders on tea farms around the world are learning the power of marketing artisan teas direct from origin
By Shem Oirere
It is the emerging specialty tea segment and licensing of cottage factories to produce purple tea that has demonstrated Kenya’s potential to transform itself from a volume producer into a country regarded for high quality and competitively priced specialty tea.
Specialty tea varieties for export earned a 30% premium in 2017, motivating smaller tea producers to make use of modern technology to link their farms directly to tea buyers and drinkers. Purple tea sells for ten times that for green tea: around $30 a kilo as against the early 2018 average of under $3.
Tumoi Teas, located in the Nandi Hills of Kenya’s Rift Valley, is one of the very first cottage factories licensed to produce artisanal teas. The company is betting that the growing demand for healthy, high-quality specialty tea will enable it to establish itself globally as a small specialty tea enterprise. General manager Boaz Katah dreams of one day becoming a reference point in Africa’s expanding tea story.
Kenya averages 1,500 meters in elevation across a range from sea level to 3,500 meters, making it one of the best locations in Africa for growing tea. The country has developed more than 50 different tea varieties suited for cultivation in seven tea growing regions. Last year Kenya produced about 10 metric tons of purple tea, the most promising of the new varietals.
Tumoi processes an average of 200 kilos a day with the support of 15 staff and 200 casuals who help with plucking, pan-firing, rolling and drying during the peak season.
“The story of Tumoi Teas is an emerging example that to be top of the tea production league is not all about the size of the farm, equipment or machinery but being the very best in what you do,” says Tumoi Teas general manager Boaz Katah.
Tumoi Teas is a story driven by persistence, optimism, and by keeping an eye on the prize that lies beyond the challenges posed by the licensing bureaucracy, limited access to financing and a pessimistic market that characterizes Kenya’s tea industry.
Tumoi emerged from the ruins of a previous collapsed tea processing investment that Boaz wants to forget forever, but which he admits emboldened him more “because I realized early in life that tea is the place to be and I was convinced there was potential to do it differently and in a better way.”
Boaz was born into a tea growing family. His father, Jacob Katah, worked for Eastern Produce for more than four decades. Eastern is part of the Camellia Group of tea suppliers with interests in Malawi and South Africa.
“Having been born in a family that was supported by proceeds from a tea company courtesy of my father, and the fact that we grew tea ourselves played a key role in my future involvement in the industry,” said Katah.
“While I was in college I bought tea from processing factories and would hawk it. The response from customers was amazing,” he said. “I soon realized I could actually buy processed black tea from tea factories and package it for sale and that is how Nandi Hills Chai was born,” explained Katah. “The brand was well received in the market,” he added.
With the success he achieved in the business of buying tea from factories and packaging it for the local market, Katah said: “I was convinced I needed to have a factory of my own.”
“Instead of a Greenfield compliant tea factory that required going through a cumbersome and rigorous licensing process, I learned of a factory that had been abandoned in Mount Elgon nearly 136 kilometers from my home in Nandi. I bought it using savings before embarking on reviving its operations,” he said. Katah soon realized he had made a wrong turn in his investment journey. No sooner had he revived the tea processing plant than things began to fall apart.
“I ran out of funds before the tea processing plant was fully operational. I was now penniless, dejected but determined to make a breakthrough in tea processing and marketing,” he said.
He was forced to sell the revived tea factory for a pittance and “I quickly set my mind to doing something else to achieve my tea business ambitions.”
“While attending a religious meeting in Nairobi, somebody announced there was an investor in Kenya who was keen on specialty teas. Anyone with information that could help him was invited to get in touch. Immediately I left the meeting and contacted the investor who happened to be from Canada,” explained Katah.
After the meeting, he introduced the Canadian investor to his father, who by this time was about to retire but remained involved in the tea industry in various ways including as a professional tea taster. “Our new Canadian friend was initially interested in contacting small-scale tea farmers in Kakamega County and wanted somebody to help set up a meeting between him and the country’s governor,” explained Boaz’s father, Jacob Katah.
“We succeeded in setting up the meeting with the governor of Kakamega, but unfortunately when the investor, Grayson Bain, arrived for the meeting at the governor’s office asked, the governor asked that the meeting be rescheduled,” said Jacob Katah.
Katah, who trained as an agriculture teacher in Egerton University in the early 1970s, said he realized how disappointed Bain was and how determined he was to set up a project in Kenya.
“I contacted the governor of Nandi County on the same day and secured an appointment for Bain and his team. We managed to meet the governor, and Bain explained to him all he wanted and how he wanted it done,” he said.
“Once I found out what he wanted I offered to help. The people in Kenya’s tea industry that he wanted to meet to help push forward his investment agenda were the very same people I was working with and interacted with in various forums. That is how our friendship and partnership with Bain and his Canadian-based JustTea brand started,” explained Jacob Katah.
“After many trials and patience, the Canadians and Kenyans established Kenya’s first-ever, small-scale farmer-owned, artisanal tea factory!” according to JustTea, which tells the story on its website. The factory contracted with purple tea farmers in the Nandi Hills to supply tea processed and dispatched to Canada for packaging and marketing. From these beginnings, Tumoi has become an international bulk tea supplier.
Tumoi started with very basic processing units that were fabricated from old metallic equipment and household utensils. “We could hand roll the tea while seated around a table and make probably one kilo and then dry it,” said Katah.
“We then sent these samples to potential customers who would tell us the taste was not good. So we repeated the process. This to me was our research and development phase,” he said. “Throughout the process, I learned more about tea cultivars in Kenya and became skillful at tasting the tea,” he added.
“Soon one of the Canadian customers said he liked the sample we sent and that set us on the road to making more of it, and of course with the first order we had to look for funds to acquire equipment and replace the fabricated processing system,” he said.
Katah initially purchased Chinese-made tea processing equipment. The equipment was powered by liquefied petroleum gas with no alternative for other fuels.
“We have since ordered new equipment from India, and we believe it will be a big boost, especially after we complete our 2018 expansion,” said Katah. During the low season, the staff upgraded the factory to enhance its processing capacity and performance. The small specialty factory is not only processing unique orthodox purple but also green, oolong, and black artisanal teas on display at tradeshows worldwide including World Tea Expo in Las Vegas.
“Purple tea has become the big story for us,” said Jacob Katah, who retired from Eastern Produce Co. Ltd. in 2105 as a senior manager in charge of seven tea factories that served 13 tea estates. He said that after participating at the 2016 and 2017 World Tea Expo in Las Vegas it became apparent the potential for purple tea in the international market is huge because it has less competition than other forms of tea and is saleable.
“For Tumoi Teas the purple tea venture came at an opportune time. The factory is able to take up all the purple tea produced in Nandi and Kericho counties and still need more,” said Katah. “At our booth during the 2017 World Tea Expo we exhibited purple tea from Kenya, and there was big interest,” he said.
After attending two World Tea Expos Katah says: “The mission for us now is to be the best source of novelty tea in the world. Tumoi Teas wants to produce world-class shelf-ready products that are in demand globally.”
It was at the World Tea Expo that Katah was introduced to another Canadian tea buyer, Millennia Tea. “We process tea very much the opposite of what the rest of the world does,” explains Tracy Bell, who started Millennia Tea with her husband, Rory Bell. “We take the leaves, and we flash freeze them as quickly as possible,” she says.
This process is meant to keep intact the biochemical state of the green leaves because the useful oxidants in them “are highest in the hours immediately they are picked,” according to Rory Bell.
At Tumoi Teas, the green leaf is frozen and shipped to Millenia Tea in Canada for packaging and distribution.
Back in Nandi, Katah says the ultimate goal for Tumoi Teas is to transform Kenya’s tea industry into one that makes outstanding teas. “Let future generations trace this transformation in the country’s tea industry to Tumoi Teas,” said Boaz.
“The plan for Tumoi Teas include being in every tea producing country in Africa where we dream of setting up shop to produce the very best tea in that market,” he added.
Katah says he has a dream. A dream of a story being told about Kenya becoming “a country of a thousand teas” and that hopefully, when this story is told, it will be narrated through Tumoi Teas.