Didas Mzirai, the Director and Founder of Mucho Mangoes situated in Taveta town, Taita Taveta County inspecting chopped bananas in a solar drier.
The vibrant Voi-Taveta road is a lush trail of adventures and also a major corridor connecting Kenya and Tanzania.
When we arrive in Taveta Town, the clear early morning skies offer serene settings with stunning vistas of snowcapped Mount Kilimanjaro.
It is here that we meet Didas Mzirai, busy sorting fresh bananas for processing, a routine that begins at the packing shed where quality checks also occur.
Mzirai is the Director and Founder of Mucho Mangoes, an enterprise that deals in value addition of bananas and mangoes.
“This is my childhood passion, the journey I began some years back at the village," he says as he gives us a tour around the premises.
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Mzirai says initially fruit processing companies from major towns like Mombasa and Nairobi used to send middlemen to pick mangoes and bananas from Taveta for export.
Brokers were exploiting the smallholder local farmers by offering low prices, also a lot of mangoes will be left behind as rejects because they do not meet the requirements of international market standards.
At one time, Mzirai had an opportunity to work with some of the companies.
He had been trained on how to handle the mangoes carefully during harvesting and packing to avoid bruising and scratching.
In 2013, he was elected as a national youth leader and that is when he began to champion for farmers, fighting for fair prices against stagnant or declining prices received by farmers.
In 2014, during a six-week Youth Leaders’ Summit in the United States, Mzirai met a youth leader from Uganda who shared to him about social entrepreneurship.
This prompted him to begin looking for funds to help rural stallholder mango and banana farmers in Taveta to overcome challenges of post-harvest losses, increase their disposable incomes and shelf life of their farm produce.
The agribusiness began with an initial capital of SH30,000 with the amount going to the registration of the company.
In collaboration with the local agricultural officials, he began mobilising and training farmers on good agricultural practices, an initiative that paid off and started attracting partners.
The company received an additional US$1,000 from the Pollination Fund, that was further invested to capacity build for more than 50 farmers.
Initially, Mucho was only a mango enterprise of fresh and solar-dried mangoes but because it was difficult to penetrate into the export market, they diversified into bananas.
“We found out that mangoes are seasonal but bananas are all year round. We also realized that there is a huge market of banana flour not only locally but also in Europe.”
Mucho Mangoes has also invested in the value addition of a blended porridge flour called Bambino that targets children living with malnutrition as a result of deficiency of iron, zinc and vitamins.
Didas Mzirai with banana flour called Bambino in Taveta.
“The highly nutritious flour is also blended with millet, sorghum, banana and pumpkin seed," he notes.
In 2018, Mzirai also took part in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Ambassadors Challenge that was run by Action Aid International Kenya in Partnership with Growth Africa and other partners and they were selected the winners.
The cash award received was pumped into the purchase of additional equipment that are used in the value addition of banana and potato crisps.
Other machinery includes the salting machine, banana chipper, washing trough and packaging machine.
Mrs Annah Jumapili, a local farmer and staff at the enterprise, says banana and mangoes are sourced from Taveta, considering that the region is blessed with ample water, good agricultural soil and a lot of bananas, mangoes and avocado.
From left, Esther Lesareyo, Esther Kenio and Annah Jumapili staff at Mucho Mangoes situated in Taveta town, Taita Taveta county, peeling bananas in this photo taken on April 3, 2025.
She adds that the business has a database of farmers who harvest for them and then sends staff to pick the produce from the farm.
Once the bananas are picked, they are weighed, put in a storage facility, sorted, then first and second washing is administered.
The production assistant then looks at the quality of water if it is still clean you don’t have to wash for the third time, followed by peeling and slicing.
“We have manual slicers whereby workers use their hands and also an electric slicer to make the work easier when the harvest is plentiful," she adds.
The chopped slices are taken to a solar drier, milled and then packaging can also be blended depending on the consumer preferences.
Mzirai says bananas are bought from farmers between SH14-18 a kilo, which is a very good price locally, while the mango prices keep on fluctuating depending on the seasons.
Products are packaged into quantities with prices ranging from Sh200 to Sh300. On the other hand, the crisps range between Sh50 to Sh100.
Didas Mzirai, the Director and Founder of Mucho Mangoes situated in Taveta town, Taita Taveta County inspecting chopped bananas in a solar drier.
The major challenge is poor feeder roads that link Mucho Mangoes to farms, especially during the rainy seasons.
Also, 2020 during the Covid -19 pandemic the business almost shut down due to closure of the international trade market
Despite the numerous setbacks, in 2019 Mucho Mangoes was feted as the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) of the Year and in 2021 Mzirai received another recognition by Kenya Goverment as a National Hero.
