“My strategy has always been to be so good that we can’t be ignored. We couldn’t find distribution, so we built our own.”
That is how Brian Kiriba, Founder of Handas Juice, describes the business he has built around jaba, a drink made from khat, or miraa. It is a line about ambition, but the more revealing part is what comes after it: the admission that Kiriba had to construct his own route to market because none existed for the product he wanted to sell.
Handas was among the companies represented at The New Pour Summit ’26 in Nairobi, where Kiriba joined a wider group of African beverage operators examining how brands can build and scale in markets where conventional assumptions about consumers and channels do not always hold. His story is a useful illustration of that theme, because for Handas, distribution was never simply an operating function bolted on after the product was ready. It became part of the product strategy itself.
A product without a category
Handas was not launching another soft drink into a market already served by wholesalers, retailers, coolers and sales routes. Kiriba was trying to commercialise an ingredient with a long-established consumption ritual, in a format unfamiliar to the very consumers who knew that ingredient best.
The idea began after Kiriba returned to Kenya and tried khat at a friend’s urging. He disliked the experience of chewing it, but not the stimulant effect that followed, and that contradiction led him to a simple question: if people wanted the effect, did they need the ritual that came with it?
He had heard of jaba, an informal drink made from khat that circulated without any real production standard behind it, and started experimenting. Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Kiriba burned out two blenders trying to process the fibrous leaves before landing on a workable formulation using the extract with water, sugar, fruit juice and hibiscus.
The innovation was not putting miraa in a bottle. It was separating the stimulant effect from the traditional ritual and asking whether a different consumer might want one without the other, a bet that eventually paid off when Handas found that traditional chewers were not the audience it needed to win. A June 2026 episode of the Financially Incorrect podcast traces Kiriba’s path through product development, manufacturing, hiring and distribution, and credits the shift to a different customer segment as the moment Handas found real product-market fit.
Building around a regulatory grey area
Handas was also building around an unsettled regulatory picture. Business Daily reported that Kenyan authorities have yet to reach a consensus on how miraa-based products should be classified, with the National Authority for the Campaign Against Alcohol and Drug Abuse, the Kenya Revenue Authority and the Ministry of Health all taking different views. Kiriba has operated on the strength of the Crop Act 2013, which recognises miraa as a scheduled cash crop, while positioning Handas as an advocate for responsible, adults-only consumption.
That uncertainty added to a more basic problem: getting consumers to understand what the product even was. Handas needed more than awareness. It needed discoverability, and it found that by appearing in places far removed from the roadside chewing culture the ingredient came from.
Building the supply chain
Turning that idea into a real business meant solving problems on both the supply side and the demand side at once.
On supply, Handas moved from Kiriba’s kitchen experiments to industrial equipment built to handle an ingredient standard beverage machinery was never designed for. Business Daily reported that Kiriba has established direct relationships with farmers in Maua and Murang’a, bypassing traditional middlemen to secure fresher leaves and give farming families a more predictable income. Bloomberg reported that the resulting operation in Nairobi can now produce up to 1,000 litres a day.
On demand, Handas had to find occasions where a bottled jaba drink made sense to a consumer who had never chewed khat. Kiriba has said the brand’s participation in EABL’s OktobaFest in 2023 gave it meaningful visibility and a subsequent lift in sales. The product went on to appear in Nairobi clubs and at parties on the Swahili coast, environments with no connection to the traditional chewing culture around khat. By the time of the June 2026 Financially Incorrect episode, Handas was reported to be moving roughly 50,000 units a month.
The lesson for other founders
Africa’s beverage markets are full of products that have to navigate fragmented retail, informal trade and uneven logistics, and the conventional advice to a founder facing that environment is to find the right distributor. Kiriba’s experience suggests a harder truth: a distributor accustomed to moving established beer, soft drinks or spirits already understands the consumer, the outlet and the sales rhythm that product needs. A genuinely new category has to prove all of that itself before any distributor will take it on.
That is what Kiriba’s line captures. The absence of distribution was the constraint. Building it was the response, and it turned what looked like a weakness into a capability that now defines the business. The harder work sits behind that one sentence: developing production capacity for an unconventional ingredient, securing direct supply relationships with farmers, and finding the customers and occasions that could make an unfamiliar product feel normal.
That is also where many founder-led beverage businesses run into trouble. A founder can make the product and sell the first cases personally, but scaling past that requires systems that do not depend on the founder being everywhere at once. Handas’s progression from kitchen experiments to industrial production, direct sourcing and a new target consumer suggests the real problem it solved was never just how to make jaba juice. It was how to turn an unusual product into a repeatable business, one Kiriba built the road for because the market had not built one for him.
