9 minute read
Capturing the taste of Tanzania in tea
Social enterprise Kazi Yetu is creating tea and jobs to be proud of. Mark Edwards talks to its co-founder, Tahira Nizari, about its Tanzania Tea Collection, the advantages of its all-women team and scaling-up operations for the global market.
Organic brand Kazi Yetu is reshaping the tea industry in Tanzania one bag at a time. On a micro level it has introduced the country to the pyramid-shaped tea bag, which allows the carefully created blends of teas, herbs and spices of its Tanzania Tea Collection to unfurl as they brew for the perfect cuppa, while its decision to process, brand and package its high-quality products at its factory in Dar es Salaam adds a domestic value chain to one of the country’s main agricultural products, which has until now been almost exclusively exported in its raw form.
Hendrik Buermann and Tahira Nizari – the husband-and-wife team behind Kazi Yetu – share backgrounds in agriculture development as well as a love of tea. After setting up home in Tanzania five years ago, the couple began plans for a range of single teas and infusions that reflected the country’s diverse tea-drinking culture that they had embraced. Ingredients were directly sourced only from smallholder farms and co-operatives that worked with nature, growing their teas, herbs or spices by chemical-free, sustainable practices. Such quality control ensured a supply of traceable, pure ingredients that were delicately paired in the signature blends of the Tanzanian Tea Collection such as Cinnamon Spice, Ginger Mint Fusion and Coco Choco.
Tea-drinking culture
Nizari – Canada born, Dubai raised and with a mother who grew up in Moshi – says: “Tanzanian tea is known for its floral qualities, which is perfect to blend and infuse with herbs, spices, and other teas. The tea-drinking culture here includes black teas, spiced teas including cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and cardamom and herbal teas such as lemongrass, moringa leaves, mint, and dried rosella hibiscus.
“This country is blessed with a range of climates, altitudes, and environmental conditions, which produce diverse herbs, spices, and teas. Our mint comes from the foothills of Mt Kilimanjaro and the Uluguru Mountains in Morogoro. Our cinnamon is grown on the sturdy trees of Zanzibar. Our black and green teas are grown in the Usambara Mountains of Tanga, and processed in Moshi.”
The self-financed venture started small with the couple relying on their own taste buds and their dining table to put the first batches of teas together.
Taste test
“We brought samples back from the various organic farms to our home in Dar es Salaam and created different blends and infusions. We would blend teas and pack tea bags on our dining table, then every morning with our breakfast we would taste different variations of the blends to see which ones were balanced and highlighted the diverse flavours of Tanzania,” says Nizari.
Operations soon outgrew the home and were transferred to a factory in Dar where a team of 15 women took charge of processing, blending, packaging and labelling the teas. Creating jobs, livelihoods and careers is fundamental to the work of Kazi Yetu. The name means ‘Our Work’ in Swahili and the social enterprise was founded on principles of economic inclusion. It aims to build lasting relationships with its small-scale farmers, treat and pay them fairly, offer affordable credit and support their growth potential. Recently, Kazi Yetu invested in a solar dryer for a long-term supplier in Marangu, in the foothills of Mt Kilimanjaro, who wanted to boost the quality and quantity of the organic herbs she grows on her family’s two-hectare plot. She is paying back with mint and rosemary over time at 0 per cent interest.
All-woman team
The choice of an all-woman team at the Dar factory is deliberate. It not only addresses the gender gap in the Tanzanian agricultural industry, but it also benefits from the fact that women excel in the roles.
“Agriculture contributes to at least 55 per cent of the workforce in Tanzania. However, women are limited to the farm level, focusing on production and harvest,” says Nizari. “As a result of socioeconomic norms, men generally sell the products, and therefore have control over the earnings. We are including and empowering women along our value chains because they have high potential to produce quality and quantity.
“Our entire team is made up of women, including a lead Operations Manager that supervises the factory operations and 13 tea packers. Their individual roles have evolved with more responsibilities to ensure quality control with systems and processes in place that empower each of them. We also offer weekly English classes for the women to upgrade their skills.”
At present the women package the tea by hand, but growing consumer demand means this isn’t workable in the long run. Tanzanian customers are buying from the collection in supermarkets in main cities, including Dar es Salaam, Dodoma, Arusha, and Zanzibar while tourists in hotels, lodges, and airports are picking up the teas as an intrinsically Tanzanian souvenir. With the tea packaged in modern, reusable tins that sustain its aroma, flavour and longevity, a potentially huge international market of conscious tea drinkers is also out there.
Kazi Yetu co-founder Tahira Nizari
Nizari and Buermann planned to take production to another level and grow into international markets by purchasing a tea-packing machine that would mean, Nizari says, “we will be able to produce 800,000 tea bags a day”. They projected this scaling up of operations would mean Kazi Yetu would employ 65 women in its factory by 2022 and increase the number of source farmers to 7,500. 2020 was going to be the year this quantum leap took place, but then, as we all know, Covid-19 arrived. The pandemic hit global and local markets and the Kazi Yetu factory closed for a time with Nizari and Buermann turning their focus towards keeping the company’s staff and its farmers safe and secure, while getting creative to sustain the business.
Nizari says: “As a social enterprise our primary goal is creating jobs to be proud of, especially for farmers and women in our supply chains. So, when Covid-19 hit, our main concern was how to keep our team employed and how to continue to source from farmers. We continued to pay our staff throughout the closure, and in the meanwhile pivoted to grow our business in new and unexpected ways, such as a new range of teas, including hot and cold brews, that we plan to launch soon.
“We have absolutely learned a lot in 2020 and last year built our resilience more than anything else. As a result of this last year, we have stress-tested our business model and learned how to be more cost-effective. We also had an opportunity to spend more time with our farmer suppliers across the country, learning more about their needs and how we can improve our working relationships to grow together.”
The tea-packing machine plan is still going ahead thanks to a crowdfunding campaign. With their own finances suddenly stretched, Nizari and Buermann didn’t want to compromise the autonomy of Kazi Yetu with outside investors so decided to call on members of the public who loved their teas and the life-changing benefits of the enterprise to donate towards purchasing the machine.
Nizari is delighted by the support and that the grand vision for Kazi Yetu lives on. “We are certain that with this, we can create thousands of jobs on the farm level and in our factory as well as grown in new markets,” she says. “From the beginning, our plan was to create a Tanzanian product that is competitive in European, North American, and Middle Eastern markets.
“Now we can finally commit to larger scale customers locally and internationally, increasing the scale of our tea brand and showing the world the flavourful quality teas, herbs and spices produced in Tanzania.”
Kazi Yetu has an all-woman team to take charge of processing its teas
Looking to the future
Tanzania is crucial to that vision. The hope is the tea collection is the first in a series of agricultural products created in the country under the guiding equitable principles of Kazi Yetu. As a child Nizari would hear her mother speak glowingly of the potential of Tanzania and that she is there now facilitating that growth means a great deal.
“My mother grew up in Moshi, where her father had a farm and little shop near Mt. Kilimanjaro. My parents and relatives always reminisce about the beauty, opportunity, and life of Tanzania. From a young age, these words and messages were entrenched in me. I was confident that I would return to our home to work together, especially with the farmers and workers, to grow. This country feels like home and will continue to be our home as we grow.”
To order Kazi Yetu teas in Tanzania or from abroad go to its Instagram page @tanzania_tea_collection or check out the website kazi-yetu.com
THE TANZANIA TEA COLLECTION
CINNAMON SPICE
Black tea from the foothills of Kilimanjaro blended with cinnamon bark from Zanzibar and cardamom seeds.
GINGER MINT FUSION
Green tea from the foothills of Kilimanjaro blended with mint and rosemary from Moshi and hand-grated ginger from Tanga.
HIBISCUS STAR
Dried Rosella hibiscus blended with ginger from Tanga and star anise from Zanzibar.
COCO CHOCO
Black tea from the foothills of Kilimanjaro blended with cocoa husks from Arusha and coconut flakes from Zanzibar.
KILIMANJARO GREEN TEA
Green tea from the foothills of Kilimanjaro.
KILIMANJARO BLACK TEA
Black tea from the foothills of Kilimanjaro.
THE KAZI YETU FAMILY
Kazi Yetu has built up a network of suppliers for its organic ingredients from tiny family farms to large plantations. Here’s a look at a few of them.
Mama and Baba Rugathe live in Marangu, a small town on the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Mama is a member of the Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement (TOAM), which supports farmers with training, advisory, and linkages in the organic sector. She runs a farm of about two hectares with a variety of herbs and a bit of coffee. Her herbs include aromatic plants including mint, rosemary, lemongrass, lemon thyme, and basil. Baba has built his own milling machine and is a local carpenter. The power couple also have a livestock business.
Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT) is an organization in Morogoro that promotes holistic agriculture growth for farmers in the Uluguru Mountains and beyond. SAT supports their farmers with training, ongoing monitoring and advisory, local and export market linkages, certification, and inputs. Kazi Yetu sources hibiscus from SAT and hopes to work with them to produce new herbal teas! It also supports support SAT’s FairCarbon4Us project by planting trees to offset carbon emissions.
Tropical Treasures is an organic tea farm and processing facility in Moshi. Mama Bente spends her days training tea farmers and supervising their processing unit, which produces whole leaf orthodox black and green tea.
1001 Organic is a social enterprise spice company that directly supports co-operatives and farmers with training, infrastructure, certification and exports their high-quality spices globally. They are located in Zanzibar and Tanga, both places that benefit from favourable weather conditions for spice production.
Elven Agri is an agri-business in Bagamoyo that runs a farm and out-grower scheme, as well as a state-ofthe-art processing facility. All ingredients are organic certified and Elven Agri guarantees quality, scale, and high return for farmers. We source lemongrass, moringa, and ginger from them.
Natural Extracts Industries specialises in sustainably grown natural extracts and flavour ingredients, including vanilla and cocoa. We source roasted cocoa husks from them as a by-product of their cocoa extracts.
