Biscuit baron who built Kenya’s first bakery

By Kenneth Kwama

Kenya: The man who founded East Africa’s biggest biscuit manufacturer, House of Manji, started out as a hawker in Karatina town, Nyeri County, where his family owned a chain of businesses including grocery shops.

Madatally Manji would sneak out of school during lunch break to sell his own wares at Karatina market. His efforts at the market did not yield much because his parents, who had migrated from Bombay, India, in 1908, insisted on utilising his skills on the family business.

They made him a clerk in charge of transportation of commodities around Central Kenya, but he didn’t last in this job. He quickly came up with a plan to start a bakery and achieved his dream when, through a partnership, he was able to buy and run one in 1941, in Nairobi.

The outlet, christened Ngara Bakeries, made only bread, cakes and other flour confectioneries.

Shortly after setting up the business, Mr Manji landed a big-time military contract to supply macaroni – a staple of traditional Italian dishes – and spaghetti to Italian prisoners of World War II and to prepare the same for the post-war period.

Ngara Bakeries grew and moved to Hasrat Road on present-day River Road, and acquired a pasta plant that had been brought by the Kenya Army from Ethiopia.

His autobiography

According to his autobiography, Memoirs of a Biscuit Baron, which he authored in 1995, the bread business was thriving during the Second World War (early 1940s) when misfortune struck.

As part of the war effort, the colonial British authorities started rationing wheat flour. The scarcity of wheat made production of bread difficult, but because they had to continue doing business, the little wheat that was available had to be mixed with a generous ratio of maize flour.

Naturally, this ruined the quality of bread that Manji and his competitors produced. Sales tumbled and Manji started smelling financial ruin. He described in his biography how he cracked his brain for a solution to his business problem for days on end.

One day he went home and his wife had made some chapatis. She used the same rationed wheat flour containing a generous mix of maize flour. Suddenly it struck Manji that the chapatis were of excellent quality despite the mixture.

He began to wonder what the secret was. Even with his renowned baking skills, he could not crack it, so he asked and his wife told him how she mixed the kneaded flour with plenty of oil.

Manji rushed back to his factory and did the same thing with his bread. The results were so good that his competitors reported him to the authorities suspecting that he was breaking the law by using smuggled wheat flour.

As competition intensified in the bread making business, he pulled out in 1952 and set up House of Manji the following year.

House of Manji was the first family business in Kenya to offer shares to the public. President Kibaki, then Commerce and Industry minister, graced the occasion on February 17, 1967.

The company was placed under receivership in November 2001 over an unpaid loan from the Kenya Commercial Bank, estimated to be between Sh900 million and Sh1.4 billion. The bad luck was attributed to competition and high costs of lending.

The entrepreneur died in September 2006.