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Kenya Tea Packers is Kenya’s leading tea blending and packaging company with over 50 products, including black tea, flavored tea, green tea, purple tea, white tea, orthodox tea, and herbal infusions. Photo credit: Ketepa.
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Ketepa is a subsidiary of Kenya Tea Development Agency Limited (KTDA), which buys tea from 650,000 farmers. These farmers own over 60 tea processing factories and produce slightly above 60% of all Kenyan tea. Ketepa, founded in 1978, offers handpicked teas from Kenya’s pristine highlands, 7,000 feet above sea level. The tea is manufactured locally by KTDA factories. Photos credit: Ketepa.
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Ketepa is a subsidiary of Kenya Tea Development Agency Limited (KTDA), which buys tea from 650,000 farmers. These farmers own over 60 tea processing factories and produce slightly above 60% of all Kenyan tea. Ketepa, founded in 1978, offers handpicked teas from Kenya’s pristine highlands, 7,000 feet above sea level. The tea is manufactured locally by KTDA factories. Photos credit: Ketepa.
In December, Kenyan Cabinet Secretary Mithika Linturi, who heads the Agriculture and Livestock Development Ministry, announced the government’s decision to suspend VAT (value-added tax) on tea processed in-country along with several National Treasury-approved incentives budgeted to expand value-addition in the new year.
Blending and packaging in the tea lands is far more lucrative than exporting bulk tea to be processed in destination countries. Value addition generates foreign exchange dollars, boosts farmer’s earnings, expands employment, and reduces logistics costs. However, local packers add value to only 10% of Kenya’s tea before export.
In 2022, Kenya President William Ruto set a goal to add value to at least 40% of tea exports during the next five years.
Linturi told attendees at the annual meeting of directors of the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) that the government intends to “unlock the potential” of Kenya’s tea. KTDA operates 57 bulk processing factories and buys from 650,000 smallholders who produce more than 60% of the tea grown in Kenya.
Eleven of the KTDA factories are currently producing orthodox tea. Two KTDA factories are installing new lines.
“I urge KTDA managed tea factories to leverage these incentives to upscale their manufacture of orthodox teas and value addition at factory level instead of continuing to make bulk tea sales,” Linturi told local press.
Directors were enthusiastic. KTDA Holdings Chief Executive Wilson Muthaura said KTDA’s current business plan encourages greater diversity of tea offerings and targets specialty tea production. “Our focus is to deepen footprints in the key international markets. This allows us to diversify our markets and ease the reliance on black CTC,” he said.
Efforts to increase value addition in-country date to 1978 when Kenya created the Kenya Tea Packers (KETEPA). At that time, there were few domestic brands. KETEPA Pride accounted for 100% of domestic sales for a decade before declining to a 36% share in 2022. There are now 200 packers operating in Kenya, supplying teas to Somalia, Sudan, UAE, Tanzania, and Zanzibar and overseas markets in the UK, US, and Japan.