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Onions are a high-value crop in Kenya, with small-scale farmers earning between Sh200,000 and Sh500,000 per acre annually when managed well.
Given the ever-increasing demand for the crop, farmers are switching to value addition to boost their earnings.
Jacqueline Kithinji, an onion farmer says she diverted into manufacturing onion-made products after realizing the raw onion market was not making enough profits.
She started farming onions after seeing her cousin do the same with irrigation. However, the venture was full of disappointment, and she could not endure the losses.
She says that the first market was profitable because it was not yet flooded, but the second, the prices were discouraging because there was the flooding of onions from Tanzania.
Further, the selling price for raw onions in the domestic market was too low compared to the production cost.
This discouraged her, and she decided to give a different meaning to onions. This was when the idea of making onion-made products was born.
She did a research and discovered people were willing to buy easy-to-make onions, noting that most of his audience said they were tired of ‘’tearing” when cutting onions.
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She started a company known as MSL Yummy, where she works as the managing director. The company makes various products, including onion juice and onion jam.
She sells a 250 ml bottle of red onion juice at Sh270, while a 400 ml bottle of onion jam goes for Sh450. Other products produced in her company include dried onion flakes, onion powder, onion paste, and onion pickles.
The journey was not easy for Mrs. Kithinji as her formulas and samples would, at times, fail, forcing her to start afresh. Further, lack of credit limited her expansion as banks were providing loans that were way below her budget.
“Sometimes you get good orders that you cannot satisfy because of lack of machinery because you cannot access capital. When I am talking about production, and you want to give me Sh200,000 or Sh150,000, that will not help me,” she says.
In addition, people did not believe in her products, arguing that a woman could not come up with such an idea. This made her products get criticism over quality. She was, however, determined to get her business to another level and did not look back.
“People ask if you cut onions, are they not poisonous? But I tell them no, I have gone through standards. After all the formulations I had to go through KIRDI (Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute), it’s not just something that you do in the house; it’s a product that we look into the international market,” she says.
Her company has so far created employment for two individuals, but the number is usually bigger when doing production. She is looking into tapping into new markets, creating solutions for many households in the fight against tearing.
