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Eric Muthomi holds a law degree from the Catholic University of East Africa. He also holds a certificate from the prestigious United States International University Nairobi where he obtained a certificate in management and innovations for agribusiness entrepreneurs. Eric also has a certificate in Business Management.
It is behind the glitz of a well-furnished banana processing plant, more than 50 dedicated employees and a host of coveted accolades that define Kenyan society. Stawi Foods and Fruits, is the inspiring story of a 26-year-old agripreneur with the tenacity of a hawk, who provided a market for hundreds of banana farmers in Kenya while redefining value addition in a country with more than 400,000 smallholder banana farmers.
Stawi Foods and Fruits has become the popular brand and an important model on the African agricultural scene. Launched in 2010 by 26-year-old Kenyan entrepreneur Eric Muthomi, Stawi Foods and Fruits is already a three-time award-winning initiative. It won the Nature Challenge to promote the sustainable use of natural resources in 2011 and, in the same year, won the agribusiness award at the Chase Bank Enablis ILO Business Plan competition.
Eric Muthomi, founder of Stawi Foods and Fruits, has completely redefined added value. His company strives to reconnect society and provide real benefit to surrounding communities. By making a major change in the buying culture, he seems to have called the time on the model where intermediaries served their own interests.
To create sustainable growth, banana farmers in Meru, one of Kenya's largest banana-producing regions, needed buyers willing to buy their products responsibly. Eric says, "It's been the same cycle over and over again." Farmers invested heavily in banana cultivation, only to be disappointed by oversupply on the market or poor wages of middlemen. I thought farmers deserved better.
Middlemen profited at farmers' expense because of low market prices caused by an oversupply of bananas on the market during the harvest period. Muthomi thought this situation needed a change.
Farmers have reacted positively to this change, as they have seen the replacement of opportunistic middlemen with a more modest entrepreneur at the head of what is now becoming a major institution, Stawi Foods and Fruits.
Partly because of the shade cast by bananas that are not available all year round, they usually become cheap during the harvest period and expensive during the dry season. In addition, price volatility was dangerous for bananas, as it was a crop used to avoid starvation and served as a food buffer in times of shortage between grain harvests. For this reason, thousands of farmers have remained poor due to waste and low yields from their banana crops. Lack of storage and processing facilities, poor road conditions and lack of access to markets have also not helped matters.
He was looking for ways to provide a market for small farmers and to increase the shelf life of bananas that would rot on farms, especially those belonging to farmers who could not reach the collection centres set up along the paved road on market days.
