Potato marketing in Kenya is evolving into a structured system aimed at enhancing profitability for farmers and stakeholders. One key approach is contract marketing, which fosters agreements between farmers and buyers, ensuring guaranteed markets and stable prices for produce. This strategy is complemented by collective production and aggregation, where farmers band together to increase their bargaining power and reduce transaction costs, thereby improving efficiency and access to larger markets.

NPCK driven by the need to harmonize market prices and trends collects potato market prices in different towns to guide the farmers and marketers on the prevailing market prices across the country and nurture healthy competition. Additionally, establishing linkages with processors facilitates the development of value-added potato products, such as chips, flour, starch, and frozen potatoes, increasing the farmers’ income and stimulating the local economy. However, the success of the potato business hinges critically on the availability of good quality seeds that guarantee quality and quantity production anchored to good agricultural practices (GAPs). NPCK has partnered with the various seed merchants in Kenya to ensure that different varieties of seed potatoes are timely availed to the farmers to the last mile through the Viazi soko platform.

NPCK and Viazi Kings ltd courtesy visit to AGRICO PSA to deliberate on seed potato availability..

NPCK and Viazi Kings also visited Simplifine Africa which processes frozen fries, Sereni fries which processes frozen fries and fresh cuts and Norda industries which processes potato crisps to explore ways to strengthen the value chain. Key discussions focused on demand-driven contract farming, quality standards, traceability, potato value addition expansion and diversification, and minimizing post-harvest losses.

NPCK visit at Simplifine  

  NPCK visit at Norda Industries