Lisa Khakayi Njenga.
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Sweet honey money: Inside Lisa Njenga’s bee-keeping world
Lisa Khakayi Njenga really has a beautiful laugh. Sweet-natured and innocent, her laugh rings the bell of her throat. It’s quick but intense, hollow yet full, an unabashed, throaty gargle, and it seems to put dazzle in her eyes as if coolly lit from within by some tiny, inner moon. She punctuates our conversation with a chuckle, or a giggle, or both.
You can hear the smile in her voice. She possesses this child-like spirit, like water washing over a smooth stone, that seems to say she doesn’t have time to be bothered by the small, everyday vagaries of life like the rest of us. Instead, she sticks to her grand vision of what she wants to achieve with her time on earth, and the rest of it just washes over her: water over a stone.
“Two years ago, I was working in New York with Unicef’s Generation Unlimited when Covid-19 hit and I had to come back home,” she says. “We were all applying for jobs and I thought, we can’t possibly all be consumers. Sometimes you have to take the chance as a producer. My mom has a farm with some beehives. I started reading up on beekeeping and ways to turn this newfound passion into a pay check.
That’s how a delectable organic honey company was birthed. Its name, ‘Oh, Honey’, Lisa says, is a reflection of her personality – the barb of a professional provocateur temperamentally averse to provocation.
“Branding is everything and I concentrated a lot on creating a worthy one. You see, honey is one of the least labour-intensive business activities. As long as you have the hives and you harvest it correctly, sometimes up to three times a year depending on how many hives you have, you’ve got a good business going. One of the biggest problems is that there is a lot of adulterated honey in the market. Do you know people even get sick? I supply to hotels tell me they used to worry because their clients were falling sick.”
Value-added products
She sighs with audible Weltschmerz. “Honey is already lucrative even if you sell it in its natural state. I pride myself in selling organic honey. The value-added products that I sell, like body butter and lip balm, are made from beeswax. I also make chocolate infused with honey rather than sugar as it is more appealing to segments of people who are concerned about health and the environment.”
For every sale, Oh, Honey plants a tree. “We are trying to offset our carbon footprint and part of our proceeds goes to training young women on how to be agripreneurs. I am also a youth development consultant with the UN and African Union. Outside of this business, I thought, why not use my passion and experience and expertise to benefit the community? The people that we train get a double benefit because we also source honey from them when we have big orders.”
Her client base ranges from online customers to establishments in Nakuru, including hotels. She is on her way to getting licensing to supply supermarkets in Nairobi but decries the red tape involved. She acknowledges that her honey is not cheap. A 1.5kg jar sells at KSh1,750. “I know the value that I am giving. My honey is authentic and organic. I do a lot of exhibitions and I am working on it to be exported. You know, in Kenya, we are able to produce so much honey, so why not export it? Globally, we are either the third or fourth highest exporter of honey. We could be the first.”
One of her highest moments was being flagged by the Kenya Investment Authority and winning a grant from a German corporation in May 2022 that served as a windvane, predicting that the winds of access were blowing her way. Shortly after, she and her business partner were invited to exhibit at the third International Kenya Investment Conference (KICO) at Safari Park in May 2023.
KICO, to those not familiar with it, is the Grammys of Kenyan exhibitions, with over 2,000 delegates from government, private sector, development partners and non-state actors. “To exhibit there, one had to pay 100K, but, out of goodwill, we didn’t pay a dime to exhibit alongside long-standing businesses. I tapped into these spaces quickly, a reminder of the blessings accorded me and my team,” says Lisa. Speaking of teams, the business has an employee base of eight, ten if you include her and her business partner. So, what’s the process of collecting honey? “Well you have to have bees, and the right wood for your hive; should I go that far back?” It’s now my turn to laugh.
Harvest honey
No, I say. “There are two types of hives,” she continues, “but I use the modern Langstroth hive, which is really great because I can harvest honey three to four times a year. With the more traditional hive, you can only harvest honey once a year. After harvesting, we clean the honey and separate it from the beeswax. We sell raw and processed honey – the difference is that the raw honey is thicker, while the other is a lot more liquid.”
Lisa projects an aura of power but not of invincibility, a girl acutely aware of her vulnerability, one who knows that where she is is not a full stop but a comma. What has business taught her? “The importance of collaboration. You can have a great idea but if you don’t have somebody to support you or hold your hand on those days that life is wearing you down, you will falter. If you want to go fast go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. That has been a very big lesson. Business is hard. Just the other day, some people came to visit and harvest honey, about 20 litres, and they wasted all of it. Do you know how much 20 litres of honey would fetch? Argh. It was a disaster. If I was doing it alone, I would have gone bonkers.”
She unravels like the frayed end of a rope, and with a warm, fluttering tone of one who’s been there, done that, lets you in on a secret: You need experts if you want to get to the level where I see myself going, she says. She tells me her employees are learning that you can be anything with diversification. “I am the CEO but I still do sales, and I still clean up. You have to be able to know everything and be okay to learn from somebody who has a different skill. I believe in linear leadership where everybody is a leader in their own right. Nobody should feel less than the other. We are all together in this.”
Organic honey
How has running a company changed her? “I think I have more belief that anything is possible. It has shown me that if you put in effort, legitimately, you can do it all.”
The longer our conversation drags on, the more starkly she reveals herself to be the kind of girl you had no idea she could be. That’s why her definition of success is simplistic, if not reductionist. “Success is contentment in where you are, where you are going, and where you’ve been; being able to enjoy the full process of whatever you are working on, knowing that wherever you are going, you’ll be happy with it; knowing that you’ve done all you can to get there. As long as you are true to yourself, you can be content in that. Your input will determine your output.”
The dream for Oh, Honey is to be a national treasure. “Oh, Honey should be the reason Kenya is on the map for exporting high-quality organic honey around the world. I want to create generational wealth. Seeing how people who come from wealthy families live, it’s a different ball game,” she says. “Even if I have to work for 60 or 70 years so my descendants can have the best lives, then I will be a happy ghost.” It is very important to be a happy ghost, she adds.
What would this ghost tell younger entrepreneurs to ignore? “Everybody has an idea of what you should do. Don’t listen to people who have never run businesses. Listen to them only if you are looking for a target consumer.
When you are starting a business, you have to believe in yourself and take everything with a pinch of salt. Not everyone will see your vision the way you see it. Create your plan and implement your business. That is the way to have a strong foundation that nothing can shake.”
Is she a music person or a movie person? “Do I have to be one?” Well, for the purpose of this conversation, yes. “I like making music but I love watching movies.” Okay, but if her life was to be a movie, who would play her and why? “Taraji P. Henson in Empire. This is quite unfortunate because I am portraying myself in a different light, but I am such a sucker for love. I had my first kid when I was 19, when I was trying to work on a music career, and then everything changed for the better, I think. I just turned 30 this year, and a man can never run my life. I have such a fire in me for myself and my kids, and I think that’s why I’d choose her.”
