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In mid September, Ben and Jake returned from two weeks in East Africa—traversing a well-worn path spanning Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, meeting with partners, reflecting on last season’s triumphs and tribulations, and calibrating expectations for the year ahead.
Across the board, the focus was on grappling with change: new export systems, infrastructure investments, and local leadership are steering these regions in new directions, and we need to ensure that we can follow and adjust accordingly.
Kenya — The Western Rift Valley Coffee Caucus is organizing around last year’s direct-export success, targeting first milling in mid-January. Samples: February–March | Arrivals: May–June.
Uganda — Harvest is just beginning, with prime collections in November–December and three key partnerships driving a bumper season. Samples: November–December | Arrivals: February–April.
Tanzania — Harvest is complete in the south and peaking in the north. Expect standout separations from Iyenga Cooperative and expanded centrally processed lots from northern partners. Samples: October–November | Arrivals: December–January.
Eldoret sits high in Kenya’s Rift Valley, better known for its champion distance runners than its coffee. But not so far west of the city, coffee is warming up for its own sort of victory lap. Reforms introduced in 2023 dismantled Kenya’s marketing-agent system and opened a system for producers to export directly. In theory, this system would have fewer layers and fairer pay, but in practice, it also stipulates new licenses, new agencies, and a pathway that feels more like a maze for those traversing it the first time.
Nonetheless, the potential undeniably remains, with few having seen the entire process through as clearly as Stephen Nendela of Muinami Estate in Trans-Nzoia. His first export under the new system was a test of both endurance and logistics:
“Once you start wanting to get into direct sales, it’s not an easy task. First and foremost, there’s a lot of documentation that you need to do.” Stephen said during a chat we had in August, adding in characteristically good humor: “up to now I don’t think I know all the steps.”
But by the time the process was finished, he’d touched every corner of the system, reading each line on myriad forms and learning each one’s associated costs.
The auction once handled all of that invisibly. Now every line item is visible, and every mistake costs time. From the farm gate out, a small estate touches a long list of desks and doors: a county pulping license and estate code; movement permits each time coffee travels (farm → mill → warehouse → secondary mill → port); estate-level grower-miller permission to sell directly; federal touchpoints for KFIS (plant/health), Kentrade platform training and access, Coffee Directorate (ICO registration, contract approvals, sample retention), KEBS standards, and food authority clearances—plus levies. None of these are conceptually hard, but together they form a cumbersome gantt chart—no one’s idea of a pretty picture. Add warehousing—chargeable by the day—and it’s easy to understand why many farmers would rather avoid this path. But Stephen’s goal—shared by others in the newly formed Western Rift Valley Coffee Farmers Caucus—is not just to move his own coffee, but to map a route that others can follow.
Last season, Stephen handled practically every aspect of the system himself—managing tasks once handled by collectors, millers, and agents, from trucking and permits to milling, bagging, and sample approvals. This year, he’s applying structure to those lessons learned: the caucus and its partners are streamlining services so producers only need to deliver to the primary mill, with reliable systems in place to handle the rest.
At every juncture, we and Stephen have looked to equate tangible value to each perfunctory role: the mill as service provider, the warehouse as independent custodian, the exporter as paperwork specialist. “When you see the actual numbers,” Stephen said, “you start to understand what value looks like.”
This visibility keeps everyone paying attention, but it also opens up space for experimentation. Muinami produced some of the first natural and honey lots on this side of the Rift—coffees that stood out in our cuppings for their clean fruit and even drying. These were possible only because Stephen knew where his coffee was going, how it would be priced, and who would taste it.
Western holdings tend to be larger than the national smallholder average—often 15–50 acres—with a farmer base trained by input-heavy maize, the region’s hallmark through the early 2010s. That equips farmers with many of the prerequisites for coffee, and also means they likely have room to scale. If the economics can demonstrate real returns, there’s no reason this region wouldn’t be poised for real success.
Little Swamps (Doris; Nandi Hills) — 2,200 MASL, flat land, irrigation drawn off nutrient-dense wetland, shade nets over raised beds, staged washes with separate waters, and measured soil corrections. Only 13 of 45 acres are planted. Doris, the owner, could not be a more encouraging spokesperson for coffee: she hands seedlings to women working on the farm to seed new plots at home, telling them that “when you talk to the plant, it smiles back at you.” It’s a line we tease her for, but a method we take seriously.
Big Tree (Paul) — A surgeon who came home from Murang’a to farm. He planted SL28 and Batian, heavy on organic matter at planting, then built a tight, orderly approach to naturals and washed: float, overnight cherry soaks in barrels, and a 30+ day covered dry. His first two harvests were humbling, but year’s lots were standouts. Next up: shade expansion, SL’s coming to maturity, and deeper participation in the Caucus.
Ruguru Orchards (Felista Njoki; with George, Kevin, and manager Lusweti) — Early Batian plantings (14 acres) on a family operation finding its footing again. George, who had sworn off coffee for dairy and avocados, walked out of a Caucus meeting convinced—and loud about it—setting a goal to plant 20 more acres and out-cup his neighbors this season.
Chepsangor Hills (Rosebella; Nandi) — A reference point and a bridge between Nandi and Trans Nzoia—part of the same Western push toward estate-level identity, farm-level processing control, and direct relationships. Last year, Rosebella hosted a fermentation workshop with Lucia Solis, producing two experimental/educational lots and establishing a fantastic baseline for more to come.
But alas, as we know—the devils are in the details. Samples have to represent reality, to move on time, and with the right paperwork. Secondary milling trims another 3–6% of volume past the primary, and dictates projections. And finally, the calendar: in the west, primary milling can finish by February; if secondary milling and releases lag to May, we’re not shipping until July, pushing arrivals later than we want them, pushing contracts later, and finally pushing cash flow and confidence. With the right service providers, and with a group like the Caucus negotiating for quicker turnarounds and rational fees, all of this is solvable so long as it’s tightly monitored from start to finish.
Bottom line: loads of effort, plenty of friction—but a credible path to long-term producer agency. Exporting directly should not mean going alone, and we’re doing our best to be meaningful company.
UGANDA | MOVING UP THE MOUNTAIN
At Masha Coffee, Sylvia Achebet and her sister Eunice completed a new high-elevation (~2400 MASL) washing station last year and expanded their solar-drying capacity, letting them process more of the cherry they once sold to traders. Masha’s strong track record has brought new collaborations—roasters abroad, field training at home—and with Eunice’s background in agribusiness and QL1 processing, this station is poised to do more. Washed lots will remain the backbone, but we expect targeted honey and anaerobic experiments this season as well. The goal is to shorten the path from cherry to stable parchment on the mountain, then validate cup quality faster with a tighter feedback loop.
The Coffee Yard, led by Norman Musoke, is growing into a regional hub. What started as a farmer-facing central processing station and drying yard in Sironko has become a small washing-station network serving both commercial and specialty clients. Norman’s expansion has been a microcosm of Ugandan’s specialty’s ascent writ large: more volume, but better-managed quality control, stronger local buying structures, and clear delineation between services once bundled under a single exporter.
In Mbale, Barbara Birungi is digging deeper into specialty. After starting her career in export logistics with Kyagalanyi, she founded Kwezi Coffee in 2019. Kwezi now operates a dry mill in Mbale, sourcing from Mt. Elgon and Kassese.
For the 2025 harvest, Barbara is renting a washing station in Bududa at 2,400 MASL to process her own cherry—washed, honey, and natural—and we hope to receive Kwezi’s first U.S. import in early 2026.
Together, these three operations provide perhaps the prettiest snapshot we’ve yet seen of Ugandan specialty.
In southern Tanzania, partners have wrapped up the first shipments out of Mbeya and Mbozi. The Iyenga AMCOS cooperative our key anchor, with quality again outpacing peers in the region.
The plan this year is to ship fast, with the southern container starting its journey while we are getting peak crop offers from the North. A second container—expected to include Mwika and other relationship coffees—will follow. Southern cooperatives are learning to pace exports without compromising freshness or traceability, a balancing act that has long hampered Tanzania’s transition into consistent specialty.
Service-provider alignment in Western Kenya: The Caucus is negotiating for bundled milling/warehousing to eliminate punitive storage fees and to move secondary milling earlier. This will be the biggest determining factor for arrival timing.
Cupping autonomy at origin: As more estates set up basic labs we’ll be able to tighten the feedback loop and make sample selection faster and smarter.
Uganda’s drying infrastructure: Solar dryers, higher-elevation stations, and documented drying curves should yield more stable moisture/water activity readings and more reliable arrivals.
Weather aside, the largest variables remain the same as last year: how policy, logistics, and financing collide as we move toward the export stage over the next several months.
In our 2023 Tanzania Pre-Harvest Plan, we wrote about what we’d learned from our partners in Mwika North, and the resulting strategy to shift support towards coffee processed at a cooperatives’ Central Processing Units rather than the more traditional, and widely common method of processing coffee at home, then delivering parchment to the cooperative.
In Mwika, we observed cherry collections came in with higher premiums paid to members, predictably higher uniformity, quality and shelf stability as compared to corresponding HP coffee. We found that other investments made more of an impact as well; interventions such as shade cloth go further in a CPU where they can impact all of the community’s coffee in aggregate.
On average, we’ve seen cup scores come in 1-1.5 points higher from CPU versus HP coffee, but more, that CPU coffee has better water activity readings, and less of a tendency to fade. This gets to the root of the drying issues which have come to characterize some of Tanzania’s coffees over the past decade, and gives us more confidence to buy more qualities, which we are expecting them to retain for more time.
With this in mind, we’ve been looking for other Kilimanjaro cooperatives who might be willing to dust-off an old pulper or invest in a new central processing unit. The best new opportunity to present itself came through the Kilimanjaro Smallholder Revival Project (KSRP).
Originally subsidized by a European company and supported by our partners at Taylor Winch, KSRP aimed to reverse a trend that began with the collapse of the strength of the Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union (KNCU) following the nationalization and subsequent re-independence of the Union and liberalization of of the coffee industry in the 1990s. Without the support of a strong union, cooperatives collapsed as private exporters worked to secure coffee by buying it directly from cooperative members.
Smallholder coffee from Kilimanjaro—where coffee had grown since 1835—used to account for over half of Tanzania’s Arabica; by 2020 it was less than one-fifth. Old trees, aging farmers, and low premiums contributed to this decline—as did regulations supporting the growth of estates. In response, a European company funded, with the support of the local coffee community, a revitalization effort—the Kilimanjaro Smallholder Revival Project—aimed at engaging the next generation of smallholders on Kilimanjaro, and in doing so, preserving the practices, cultivars and profiles that first made Tanzanian coffee renowned.
The project and its German partners identified 9 AMCOSs to solicit for participation in the project then worked with them to secure organic certification and guaranteed premiums to promote quality and re-engage farmers; provided SL-28 seedlings, which were the cultivar that made coffee from Kilimanjaro famous; and established a youth corps to train the next generation of coffee producers.
We signed up to back cherry premiums for KSRP member groups who had the capacity and interest to collect and process cherries; specifically Marangu West, Lukani Lossa and Mrimbo Uuwo. Most of the volume would come from the six other cooperatives, and overall, come in as HP parchment—and therefore likely below the 85pt quality standard for Crop to Cup purchases. But the broader KRSP network and its backers lined-up a buyer in Europe for the coffee who, at the last minute, backed out—creating an opportunity for Crop to Cup to get involved in the project with the help of Taylor Winch.
For 2023, we were able to separate these coffees, which were collected in full container loads, by AMCOS. We hope, over the next few years, to work with partners to improve qualities and separations coming from their CPUs.
Kilimanjaro Reaches New Heights
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