Eric Muthomi a Kenyan lawyer who built a successful business from a simple ‘banana idea’ is Founded and CEO of Stawi Foods (Kenya).Stawi Foods and Fruits Limited is an award winning food processing business based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Education
Eric Muthomi holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Law from Catholic University of Eastern Africa. He also has a certificate from the prestigious United States International University Nairobi where he was awarded a Certificate in Management and Innovations for Agribusiness Entrepreneurs.
Eric has also has a Certificate in Enterprise Management.
Career
Eric Muthomi,-CEO-Stawi is Behind the glitz of a well furnished banana processing plant, over 50 dedicated staff and a host of coveted accolades that define Kenya’s Stawi Foods and Fruits company, is the inspiring tale of 26 year old Agripreneur with the tenacity of a hawk, who has provided ready market for hundreds of banana farmers in Kenya while redefining value addition in a country that boasts of over 400,000 smallholder banana farmers.
Stawi Foods and Fruits has become the popular brand and an important model on the African agriculture scene. Started in 2010 by 26-year-old Kenyan entrepreneur Eric Muthomi, Stawi Foods and Fruits is already a three-time award winning initiative. world wide It won the Nature Challenge competition geared at promoting the sustainable use of natural resources in 2011, and, in the same year, bagged the winning prize for agro-processing in the Chase Bank Enablis ILO Business Plan competition.
Eric Muthomi, founder of Stawi Foods and Fruits, totally redefined value addition. His company is making effort to reconnect society, and provide genuine benefit to surrounding communities. In providing a major buying culture change, he appears to have called time on the model where middlemen served their own interests.
To create sustainable growth, banana farmers in Meru, one of the largest banana producing regions in Kenya, needed buyers willing to purchase their produce at responsible prices. Eric says, ”It has been the same cycle over and over. Farmers would invest heavily in banana farming, only to end up disappointed by an oversupply in the market or poor pay by middlemen. I thought farmers deserved better.”
Middlemen were profiteering at the expense of the farmers because of the low market prices caused by an oversupply of bananas to the market during harvest time. Muthomi believed this situation required a shift.
Farmers reacted positively to this change, as they saw the replacement of opportunistic minded middlemen with a more modest entrepreneur at the top of what is becoming a major institution, Stawi Foods and Fruits.
Partly due to the shadow cast by bananas not being available all year, they usually become cheap during harvest time and expensive in the dry season. Furthermore, the volatility in price was dangerous for bananas, as it was a crop used to avoid famine and served as food buffer in times of scarcity between cereal harvests. Due to this, thousands of farmers remained poor as a result of waste and poor yields from their banana harvests. Lack of storage and processing facilities, bad roads and poor access to markets, also did not help matters.
“I was looking for ways of providing a market for small-scale farmers and increasing the shelf life of bananas, which would rot in farms, especially those belonging to farmers who could not reach the collection centres set up along the tarmac road on market days,” says the CEO of Stawi Foods and Fruits.
Eric Muthomi
The farmers held their breath for many years, as about half of the bananas harvested in Kenya either got rotten, wasted or never got sold. Several farmers were left teetering on the brink of poverty, as they suffered serious losses as their produce go to waste or was sold at throw-away price. Muthoni’s Stawi Foods and Fruits changed that cycle. His company improved farmers lives by gauranteeing an income for them.
Muthoni’s banana flour is big business. On how he came up with his innovative idea, he says, ”My business idea was simple to come up with because in my home community back in Meru bananas were grown in plenty, and also it is not like banana flour is something common in the country. It is a unique product for the market.”
Awards and Recognitions
Eric has received four awards for his outstanding work including an international award by Forbes Africa for Top 30 under 30 best young entrepreneurs in Africa.
- Stawi was featured on CNN in January 2014 as a promising company that is impacting smallholder farmers in Kenya and creating jobs for youth.
- Top 30 under 30: Africa’s best young entrepreneurs, Forbes Africa, February 2013.
- Stawi founder and CEO, Eric Muthomi was honoured in February 2014 by Forbes Africa Magazine as a Top 30 under 30 entrepreneur who is making a great impact across Africa.
- National winner in Nature Challenge Africa, World Wide Fund for Nature, wi.December 2011, Nairobi, Kenya
Recognition was received for positive environmental impact of Stawi Foods and its potential to create employment opportunities for Kenyans while reducing post-harvest losses. - Stawi Foods won this award because it had enriched several banana farmers in rural Kenya whose abundant produce would otherwise have gone to waste or sold at a throw-away price to brokers. The business idea of turning bananas into flour was unique as it incorporates value addition, commercial viability because of its scalability, food security promotion, employment provision to Kenyans and markets for surplus agricultural produce.
- Eric was the top winner in the agro-processing category in this competition because his business idea for turning bananas into flour would improve food security, reduce post-harvest losses, create incomes for farmers, create jobs, and support Kenya in achieving Vision 2030
https://twitter.com/muthomistawi
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