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Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) disrupt food systems to deliver healthy diets to urban consumers: Twiga case study, Nairobi, Kenya

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Title Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) disrupt food systems to deliver healthy diets to urban consumers: Twiga case study, Nairobi, Kenya
 
Creator Chege, Christine Gacheri Kiria
Onyango, Kevin Omondi
Lundy, Mark M.
Kabach, Joram
 
Subject small and medium enterprises
agrifood sector-food and agricultural sector
food access
food systems
food supply-food availability
 
Description Micro Small and Medium-Enterprises (MSMEs) in many developing countries play an important role in the agri-food systems. They provide employment opportunities as well as source of foods for urban consumers. In Kenya, the MSMEs provide an interesting disruption in the rapidly growing traditional markets. Efficient sourcing of foodstuffs is one of the challenges faced by MSME food vendors in Nairobi. Traditionally small-scale food vendors travel by informal buses to wholesale wet markets several times a week to source limited volumes of fresh fruit and vegetables. These early morning trips generate additional costs including bus fare, relatively high unit costs for small volumes of purchases, insecurity, and opportunity costs for mostly female vendors.
Twiga Foods, a Kenya agritech and logistics private company formed in 2014, seeks to resolve some of these issue through the efficient sorting and distribution of fresh produce in urban Kenya to reduce fragmentation in the produce market (Cook & O'Neill, 2020). It employs a cashless mobile-based business-to-business (B2B) food supply (fruits and vegetables) platform that connects farmers to small and medium-sized vendors, outlets and kiosks, and the main aim is to address the problem of food flow from farmers to markets in urban areas across Kenya (Cook & O'Neill, 2020; von Bismarck-Osten, 2021).
What can the Twiga Foods case teach us about the potential of a disintermediation model in the LMIC food system to provide multiple benefits in terms of food and nutrition security, incomes, employment, and potential spill-over effects?
 
Date 2023-06
2023-06-15T12:16:54Z
2023-06-15T12:16:54Z
 
Type Working Paper
 
Identifier Chege, C.G.K.; Onyango, K.O.; Lundy, M.M.; Kabach, J. (2023) Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) disrupt food systems to deliver healthy diets to urban consumers: Twiga case study, Nairobi, Kenya.
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/130733
 
Language en
 
Rights CC-BY-4.0
Open Access
 
Format application/pdf