Gabriel Kwendo, Emmanuel Ogise and Joseph Bosire are the founder of Comrade Dairy and Food Enterprises in Njoro, Nakuru County.
The three business partners met when they were first year students at Egerton University where they pursued animal science related courses.
The trio started their business in 2018 with Ksh 120,000 capital, money which they had contributed equally.
Here is their story as told by WoK.
Gabriel Kwendo, Emmanuel Ogise and Joseph Bosire met in 2011 when they were both first year students at Egerton University.
At the time, Kwendo and Ogise pursued Diploma in Dairy Technology.
Kwendo later advanced to Bachelor of Science in Agriculture, while Ogise took Bachelor of Science in Animal Science respectively.
On the other hand, Bosire studied dairy technology and management.
Several years into their friendship, the three thought of entering a partnership and venture into the milk business.
“We were good friends before we thought of getting into milk business in 2018. We raised Sh120,000 capital, each one of us contributing equally, to venture into milk business,” Kwendo said.
In an interview with Nation, they added that they were able secured a Ksh 500,000 funding from various incubation programmes at the university.
They used the funding to purchase among others a fridge, milk cans, pasteuriser and leased a shop for operations.
“We began by selling pasteurised milk to the community. It has been an interesting journey; when we started, we were carrying milk on our backs from the farmers to the facility,” Bosire disclosed.
Ogise explained that while establishing the business, their idea was to supply fresh milk to Egerton University students.
As of 2021, they had grown from supplying milk to making sweet yoghurt.
Their business space has a reception, laboratory, processing plant, fermentation, packaging and cold storage areas that can accommodate up to 20,000 litres a day.
They also have alcohol guns, burettes and pipettes for quality checks.
“We are now making yoghurt and sour milk besides selling the fresh milk, our premier product. We make strawberry and vanilla yoghurt flavours,” Kwendo added.
They sell a 500ml pack of yoghurt to wholesalers at Ksh 80 and consumers at Ksh 100.
For sour milk or maziwa mala, a litre retails at Ksh 120 and fresh milk at Ksh 70.
They work with 60 dairy farmers from Njoro, collecting 180-300 litres of milk per day with 60 percent of the milk is going to yoghurt and sour milk.
The trio mentioned lack of enough financing to help improve production capacity as one of their major challenges.
The company has employed 10 youths on contract.
