Tabitha Karanja used to be a librarian in Kenya, so how is it that she ended up starting a brewery which broke an 80 year monopoly in Kenya?
First, we need to talk about beer. Terrible, I know.
The first beer kingpins in Kenya were George and Charles Hurst, two English brothers who started a brewery in 1922. The following year, George came off second best while hunting an elephant… and second best meant that it was George who died, not the elephant. In a slightly twisted tribute to George, his brother decided to name the brewery’s main product Tusker, and put an elephant on the label.
Tusker has gone on to become a world famous beer, and can be bought in major UK supermarkets today. The brewing company that owned it, East African Breweries, is now under the control of global alcohol beverages company Diageo. Diageo also owns brands like Guinness, Red Stripe, Johnny Walker, Smirnoff, Gordon’s, and many more. Basically, it’s giant, and based in London.
So for the 80+ years since Tusker and East African Breweries started, they dominated the Kenyan beer scene. And by the 21st century, there wasn’t all that much about the company that was actually Kenyan.
Now we can get back to Tabitha Karanja.
As mentioned, Tabitha started out as a librarian, but was a bit under-stimulated. So she started working with her husband at his hardware store, but still… under-stimulated. What better way to get stimulated than to take on Diageo, which turned over £14 billion (US$21 billion) in 2014?
The problem she identified was that there wasn’t an affordable, good quality drink for local people to enjoy. This was causing a lot of local people to brew unsafe, unclean liquor in their back yards. So she created a company called Keroche Breweries in 1997 aged 32, and started making fortified wine. Local banks were initially uninterested in lending her money to start the business, as it was seen as unconventional and risky. But Keroche’s first product proved to be popular.
It wasn’t plain sailing from there, though. A change in Kenya’s taxation system suddenly made her product a lot more expensive, and forced her to reassess her business. Government officials weren’t always helpful either, which was odd considering that Keroche was a locally owned success story. Then there was strong competition from East Africa Breweries, which was not happy with the idea of having a rival in the Kenyan market. To top it off, there were even examples of notable politicians encouraging consumers to ignore her business.
Very tough times for an entrepreneur.
So… in 2007 she decided to start brewing beer, and push even harder. Her beer, Summit Lager, was launched in 2008, and Kenya’s Prime Minister turned up to the launch as a gesture of support. “After so much pain and sleepless nights, my dream had been achieved and this was the best day in my life,” she said.
And things grew from there. In 2009, further investment into the business increased production capacity to 6,000 bottles per hour, and the brewery can now produce 15,000 bottles per hour. Summit Lager now accounts for more than 5% of the beer sold in Kenya, and is increasing.
"People thought it was not possible to break the monopoly of the existing company that was there, because it has been there for 80 years," Karanja said. But in addition to doing that, her company is a success story for African business, and for women in business.
"Even for a young girl all she thinks is to get married, get children take care of the husband," Karanja told CNN. "But if our culture can change that -- 'yes, you'll get married, get your children, but also there is something else that you need to do: you need to develop your country in one way or the other.
"Women have always believed that it is men who are supposed to do that ... so for me what we can do is challenge the women to think further and to believe that we can do even better than men."
Inspiring stuff, hey!
And for those of you with a love of irony, have a closer look at the photo of Tabitha that's at the very top of the article. The one where she won the 2014 African Business Leaders' Award for East African Businesswoman of the Year. She's holding part of her prize... a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label whiskey. I bet she went home and poured it down the drain!