Vava Angwenyi spent 17 years rebuilding Kenya's coffee trade
The Nairobi entrepreneur founded Vava Coffee to pay smallholder farmers more directly, and now sources from more than 30,000 growers, work profiled this month by Sprudge.
Vava Angwenyi has spent 17 years building a coffee business designed to pay Kenyan smallholder farmers more directly, work marked this month with a profile in Sprudge's annual Sprudge Twenty series.
Angwenyi founded Vava Coffee in 2009, starting with a single counter, Vava's Coffee Lounge, at Barclays Plaza in Nairobi. She has said the business grew out of frustration at how little coffee farmers earned while international chains built profits on their beans. Angwenyi trained first in actuarial science and statistics in Canada, then completed a master’s in international finance and management in the Netherlands before returning to Nairobi to start the venture.
Vava Coffee now exports, roasts and consults on coffee value chains, selling eight house brands including Nairobi Roast, Swahili AA and Sotik Espresso, and sourcing from more than 30,000 smallholder farmers across Kenya.
Seventeen years in and the hardest trade to fix isn't the coffee. It's who gets paid for it.
From a coffee lounge to an export house
Angwenyi has since built out a small group of ventures around that first counter: Ocean Love Coffee; La Dulce Toro, a specialty coffee school and café on the island of Lamu; and Gente del Futuro, a youth coffee network she co-founded that spans Kenya, Tanzania and Colombia.
She holds a Q Grader certification, the coffee trade's equivalent of a wine sommelier qualification, and has sat on the Specialty Coffee Association's board since 2019, serving on its finance and sustainability committees. In 2024 she published Coffee Milk Blood, a book built around personal stories and power dynamics inside the coffee trade.
A seat on the committees that set the rules
Angwenyi has named the entrepreneurs Gary Hirshberg, of Stonyfield Farm, and Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, among those who shaped her approach to values-led business.
Her export model sits inside a coffee market that keeps swinging on its own: Devoción's new farmer impact fund and arabica prices sliding to a three-month low both landed in the same week as her Sprudge profile. Seventeen years on, Angwenyi is still arguing that who gets paid matters as much as what gets roasted.
