More needed to popularise local coffee

One of the proposals suggested by the National Task Force on the coffee sub-sector is to improve farmers’ incomes by promoting drinking of local coffee. There are many ways of doing this.

There used to be an advert for a personal health product sometimes ago. The promoters used well-known people to successfully sell the product. The item carried a strong social stigma.

However, after several years of marketing, people, especially the youth, came to accept it. This is called social marketing. It is used to sell concepts or change cultural attitudes.

One of the biggest weaknesses in the coffee sub-sector is that we drink very little of it. Of all the coffee grown locally, 98.6 per cent is taken by foreign consumers.

Kenyans prefer tea and beer to coffee. This is despite our coffee being some of the best in the world.

Compare this with Ethiopia where half of the 500,000 bags of coffee produced are locally consumed. Coffee originated in Ethiopia and is infused in their social, religious and cultural practices.

This approach can be replicated here if coffee is positioned correctly. Our poor coffee drinking culture is a carry-over from the colonial past. The British colonialists were a tea-loving people.

Today, younger Britons prefer coffee. We are stuck with tea ‘with a cloud of milk’ which the French say is for lactating mothers.

The implementation committee could adapt social marketing tools to persuade Kenyans to start drinking coffee. The momentum is already there.

This is fuelled by a burgeoning middle class, hence Java, KFC, Subway, Café Deli etcetera.

But this could be accelerated. The committee should consider engaging corporate firms to fund a blitzkrieg advertising campaign, the same way they sponsor campaigns to promote hand washing among children.

It would help a lot if adverts associate coffee drinking with successful corporate people or famous Kenyans. Media groups could support coffee drinking using their well-known writers. It is called the snob appeal. Impressionable youths are good at it and it should not be so difficult to strengthen a coffee culture among them.

After all, there is something snobbish about coffee. Hear the cupping (testing) language: it has silky strains... cadences of romantic taste, musty and floral...

Social marketing has to be supported by infrastructure. The task force proposed initiatives like ‘youth coffee start-ups’. These should be chic in order to cater for increasingly social and economic sophistication.

If we get it right, we will build local specialty outlets. Of course the market should be segmented for different clientele. For the specialty market, the idea is to position the coffee as unique. Anything genuine is welcome.

The problem with African commodities is that we produce them wholly for the west. Thus, the concepts are functionally associated with practices in Europe or the US.Niche markets are not a thing only in Paris or New York. We can create them here. The likes of Java target a special class. These are individuals who can afford 250 shillings for a tiny of cup of coffee.

What you buy in Java is not just a few millilitres of coffee but also class and ambience, or being there, on Moi Avenue, ‘upper Nairobi’.

It is not the same as buying the same coffee on Kombo Munyiri Road in Gikomba.

We can use coffee to foster national unity. There is the ‘unique story’ strategy. In this, ‘Geographical Indication’ (GI) is used. GI indicates that the coffee is from a special area, and with it positive characteristics of the people who produce it.

In all, the implementing committee will have to think outside the box if it is to succeed in starting coffee drinking habits among Kenyans.