Demand isn’t the problem; broken input systems are. Fixing them could unlock 5,000 youth jobs and make local processors competitive again.
When Everyone Is Rational and the System Still Fails
Few meals are as quintessentially Kenyan as chicken and chips. From roadside kiosks to fast-food chains, this simple pairing cuts across classes, incomes and geographies. Yet behind the ubiquity of this dish lies a quiet paradox: despite surging demand, the value chains that underpin chicken and chips remain structurally fragile and chronically underperforming.
Over the past months, through deep-dives into both the potato and poultry sectors culminating in a recent webinar with processors and off-takers, a consistent message has emerged: demand is not the problem; reliability is. Kenya does not lack buyers or consumers. It lacks the aligned systems required to consistently produce what the market wants, when it wants it, and at the quality and cost it requires.
Most Kenyan potato farmers grow what they can afford and sell where they can be paid quickly. That usually means informal markets that are cash-based, fast-moving, and tolerant of variability. They suit the realities of smallholders managing tiny plots with limited cashflow.
Processors, on the other hand, operate under entirely different pressures. They must produce to specification, on schedule, with low rejection rates and high plant utilisation. Yet the varieties they require such as Markies, Voyager and Dutch Robijn are rarely available locally. Farmers overwhelmingly plant Shangi, a fast-maturing table potato well-suited for boiling and local markets but poorly suited for frying due to its inconsistent dry matter content and storage behaviour.
Even when farmers try to grow to spec, the system is stacked against them: less than one per cent of potato seed in Kenya is certified. Without clean planting material, yields stagnate at 8–10 MT/ha against a potential of 30–40 MT/ha, and quality falls short of processor standards.
Poultry tells the same story in a different register. Feed which accounts for 50 to 60 per cent of production costs is among the most expensive in East Africa, while reliable day-old chicks are costly and erratic. Formal buyers demand strict weights, chilling and biosecurity, but often pay slowly; informal wet markets pay in cash on delivery and overlook variability. Rationally, farmers choose speed and certainty over delayed payments and penalties.
The outcome is predictable: processors operate at barely 40 per cent of installed capacity, unable to compete with imports on cost, while farmers remain locked into low-productivity systems that deliver neither scale nor stability.
No Seed, No Scale
Most discussions about agricultural competitiveness focus on prices, yet price cannot compensate for the absence of foundational inputs. The central choke point in both value chains is not farmer motivation or processor behaviour, it is the absence of reliable seed, breeds, and input systems to produce to specification.
Without accessible stocks of processing-grade potato seed, it is impossible to meet the size, shape, dry matter and storability attributes that processors require. No amount of training, contract design or pricing reform can overcome this bottleneck. It must be solved upstream before efficiency can flow downstream.
From Seed to Scale: A 5,000-Job Youth Opportunity
Fixing this seed bottleneck offers a powerful economic opportunity particularly for young people through the production of apical cuttings.
Apical cuttings are clean, disease-free potato plantlets produced in greenhouses from tissue-culture mother stock. They allow fast, local multiplication of varieties commonly grown by farmers, such as Shangi, as well as processor-preferred varieties like Markies. Each cutting can generate multiple tubers within a season, compressing a seed multiplication process that typically takes five years into just two to three cycles, while reducing the disease risks that undermine conventional seed systems.
This is an inherently youth-friendly enterprise: it requires only a ¼-acre plot, modest capital (about KES 250,000 to set up a greenhouse), fast turnover, and serves a market where demand far exceeds supply. A small unit can produce 10,000-15,000 apical cuttings per cycle, selling at KES 10 each. With one to two trained operators per ward in key potato counties, this model could create 2,000–2,500 youth-led seed enterprises employing around 5,000 young people while simultaneously solving the certified seed constraint that keeps processors starved of consistent, quality raw material.
From Plate to Seed: Reversing the Logic with Collaboration
Kenya’s challenge is not a lack of effort. It is a lack of alignment. Farmers grow what they can, buyers demand what they cannot get, and processors limp along at half capacity while imports quietly fill the gap.
To change this, we must reverse the logic: start from the plate and plan backwards to the seed. That means specifying the products the market wants (chips-grade potatoes, standardised poultry weights), aligning input systems to produce them, and financing production based on off-take contracts rather than collateral.
Solving these systemic bottlenecks isn’t a solo effort – it demands collaboration across sectors to align incentives, share expertise and scale solutions. That’s why Kuza has collaborated with TRANSFORM, an impact accelerator led by Unilever, the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and EY, to tackle agricultural challenges in Kenya and beyond. Through this collaboration, we are leveraging over 3,000 trained local changemakers, our “Agripreneurs” – entrepreneurial leaders who deliver market-aligned guidance to smallholder farmers to start thinking market first, Using over 10,000 bite-sized, hyperlocal videos accessible online/offline through Edge Computing, these young Agripreneurs help farmers make smarter decisions about what to grow, when, and how based on market demand.
The change is happening but more stakeholders in the sectors need to join and collaborate to drive faster impact.
If Kenya can align these pieces, chicken and chips could become more than a popular street meal. They could become a case study in how to rebuild value chains for competitiveness, jobs and food security.
Because chicken and chips are not hard to eat – they are just hard to coordinate.
By Sheena Raikundalia, chief growth officer at Kuza