Cherotich Rutto, founder and chief executive officer of Tawi Fresh Kenya, started farming about 10 years ago while still in corporate employment, looking for an alternative source of income. She had never farmed before, but agribusiness was always at the back of her mind.
Last week, that decision paid off when she was named one of the winners at the Women Agripreneurs of the Year Awards, held on the sidelines of the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, Rwanda. She took home $25,000 in the Female Agricultural Tech Innovators category.
Two other Kenyan women also placed as second runners-up in their respective categories, each taking home $8,000: Irene Etyang’ in the Women Empowerment Champion category, and Millicent Okumu in the Women in Agricultural Technology category.
Cherotich tells Nation that her venture was born out of the challenges she faced as a novice farmer.
“I lacked access to markets. I didn’t know what to grow and when, because I didn’t have information at that time. I also did not have access to credit, and there was no price transparency,” she says.
She was often short-changed by brokers, who had the final say over price and quantity. They dictated how much they wanted and set the market price, usually lower than she expected. That experience pushed her to build an organised supply chain, from farm to customer’s plate, giving farmers the autonomy to decide what works best for them.
Cherotich and her husband settled on a business-to-business model, working with institutional buyers because their orders are predictable and consistent.
“We match the order or the demand to the farmers on our platform. Once these orders are generated, they’re then linked to the farmer,” she explains.
Her company now works with more than 2,000 farmers, 65 per cent of them women and 29 per cent youth. The platform offers price transparency based on customer specifications, helping farmers understand what to grow and, in turn, improve the quality of their produce.
When the announcement came that she had won, Cherotich felt that years of quiet effort had finally been recognised.
“I was extremely happy. And I felt that all the efforts my team, our partners, our farmers, and our clients and I have been making are being recognised and validated. The award is actually for everybody back home,” she says.
“The work that we do back in Kenya has now been recognised at a regional platform. That was really exciting and humbling, because when you work, you don’t lift your head to say, I’m doing this so that I get an award. I do it so that I can impact more of our smallholder farmers in Kenya,” she explains.
Over time, she has learned that understanding customer demand in advance helps farmers produce just enough, reducing post-harvest losses, a persistent problem in the sector.
Food losses
“Almost 40 to 50 per cent of fresh produce is lost just across the supply chain because of the inefficiencies within it,” she says.
When she and her husband started out growing capsicum and tomatoes in Nanyuki, they simply looked at what others in the region were planting.
“We realised that we didn’t have a lot of information because even the time we were planting, we didn’t know about the seasons. By the time we were harvesting, there was an influx in the market, so we couldn’t get a good price, and it was just a mess,” she recalls.
“We also lived away from the farm, which was a bit of a challenge. So, slowly, we did a lot more research. We visited many farmers. We spoke to people who were already in the business. And we slowly pivoted into herbs for export,” she says.
She later shifted to fresh herbs for export after discovering demand for the product abroad. Although passionate about farming, Cherotich treats it strictly as a business, always thinking about how to commercialise it. Three years ago, she quit her job to focus on it full-time.
She believes solutions to Kenya’s agricultural challenges already exist among Kenyan women, who must rise and offer them to their communities. While the country is making progress, she says organising markets better could cut food losses significantly.
“We need to enable or create an enabling environment for farmers through these platforms where they can see the demand from customers,” she says.
Over the years, she has watched her farmers grow their operations, from under two acres when they started to nearly eight acres now.
“We have an array of portfolios. We serve schools, hospitals, and large institutions. We then bring that information back to the farmers. Whether someone needs a large onion, a small onion, a greenhouse tomato, an open field tomato… and so on,” she says.
She notes that the market mostly asks for three things: timely delivery, consistent supply, and price transparency. The enterprise also conducts quality checks on the farmers’ behalf to ensure deliveries meet client needs.
“We do a check at the farm gate, another quality check through the aggregation centre where we receive the produce. We then sort, grade and then pack into the client specification and do another quality check,” she says. “Before dispatch, there’s another final check before it’s delivered to the customer.”
The service is free to farmers, who are instead charged through the margin between the buying and selling price. Cherotich envisions her firm becoming “the Amazon of fresh produce” across Africa.
“I will tell young farmers and women farmers that it is possible to make money through agriculture. Let’s not think of ourselves as farmers, but think of ourselves as agripreneurs. When we wake up in the morning and go to our farms, let’s believe that we’re running a business. We’re just not doing farming,” she says.
