A Trip to the Market with Stan the Mboga Man

Outdoor food stalls are one of my favorite things about Nairobi. They are my favorite places to eat and to buy groceries. There are two main types that I love:

Kibandas: Street food restaurants, typically set up under tarps, where people cook food all day (1)
Vegetable / fruit stands: Similarly set up under tarps, where you can buy very cheap fruit and vegetables, most commonly bananas, carrots, sukuma wiki (a kale-like leaf), mangoes (2)

I’ve gotten very curious about how these shops work from a business perspective because they are everywhere, the fresh food seems impossibly cheap (I spend probably $10 a week at the kiosks and it makes up over half of the food I eat), and because agriculture and outdoor markets are so important to Kenyan economic life (agriculture is ~25% of Kenyan GDP and employs ~40% of people).

So yesterday I asked the guy who runs my favorite vegetable stand if I could go with him to the wholesale market where he buys his food. He (let’s call him Stan) was happy to take me along, partly because he’s friendly and partly because he wants me to buy him a pickup truck and hoped that seeing how the market worked might make me more likely to do so.

I met him at 8am today (a Sunday morning) and we drove to Marikiti Market (also called Wakulima Market), a huge outdoor food market near Nairobi’s Central Business District. Here’s what I saw and learned (3):

The reason Stan wants me to buy him a pickup truck is because it’s illegal for him to transport large amounts of produce in his car (a small Toyota passenger vehicle). I learned this when he told me to roll up my window on the way back from the market, so that the cops wouldn’t see the 400 pounds of vegetables in the backseat and trunk. I guess there’s some kind of rule against using a passenger vehicle for commercial purposes, but it seems like tons of shop-owners do this anyways.

The market was full of carriers - guys who would swing enormous bags of polypropylene sacks on their backs and hustle them through the market. Stan hired a carrier who followed him around all morning, making trips back and forth to the car as Stan bought stuff. I saw this carrier - probably 5’6” and not super built - hoist 90kg (200 lbs) of watermelons onto his back and march away.

When brokers pick up produce from farms in Kenya, or arrange for crops to be shipped in from other countries like Uganda, Tanzania, or South Africa, their first stop in Nairobi is Marikiti. So even though there are several large outdoor food markets in Nairobi (e.g., Ngara market), sellers at those markets are buying from Marikiti.

The market was so big that there was an ecosystem of people selling just to the wholesalers: People were walking around hawking tea, snacks, bags, and sanitary wipes.

A lot of people were pretty amused to see a white person there. I kept hearing shouts of “muzungu!” (means white person, or more generally a non-black foreign person), one guy asked me why the US has white supremacists and asked if I had seen the George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery videos, and another couple guys taught me to say “A muzungu has a white stomach” in Massai, which I have unfortunately forgotten.

A little bit on the finances of a vegetable stand

Stan’s typical markup seems to be ~20-30% on what he pays for his produce wholesale, and his daily revenue has dropped by ~60% due to COVID. He said that before the pandemic, on a typical day he would sell ~$180 of produce, for which he paid ~$150. But he’s located in a business area, so has seen way less business due to people working from home, and now he only makes ~$80 in net revenue a day.

Stan also pays ~$50 a year to the government for a license to run his shop.

Footnote 5 has additional finance and food quantity information for the curious (5).

Overall this was super interesting, and I’m going to start asking people if I can tag along as they go about their work more often. I got to see and understand a part of Nairobi and the Kenyan economy I never would have gotten to see otherwise.

1. You can buy chapatis (an Indian flatbread), ugali (a maize-meal dish found all over Africa but called different things in each place), mandazi (basically fried dough), nyama choma (grilled meat), stir-fried beans and vegetables, etc (1). A meal usually costs around $1.50, but I did get food poisoning once from the stir-fried sukuma-wiki, so you have to be careful!

Apparently other Africans make fun of Kenyan cuisine for being pretty bland and unoriginal: Their three biggest foods are, respectively, from India (chapati), not unique to Kenya (ugali), and just cooked chicken or lamb (nyama choma)

2. Women who run these stands are called “Mama Mbogas” (mboga = vegetable)

There are other types of outdoor food options too that aren’t quite as fun but are still cool:

Food carts: Mostly selling sausages

Kiosks: Huts that have doors and counters, often sponsored by wireless networks (Safaricom or Airtel) where you can buy bottled water, processed snacks, and extra cellular data
Other small tables on the roadside selling packaged peanuts, crackers, and small toys

3. The source for most of these facts is Stan, and neither his English nor my Swahili is perfect (4) so some things may have been lost in translation

4. My Swahili is practically nonexistent

5. Here’s what Stan bought, including quantity, wholesale price he paid at Marikiti, and what the price he plans to re-sell at (where I was able to get the info). All the prices were in Kenyan shillings, but I translated to USD (it’s about 1 shilling to US $0.01)

Peas: Bought 1 grocery bag full
Beets: Bought ~10, for $0.40 each, will sell for $0.50
Avocados: Bought 60 large for $0.50 each, will sell for $0.60
- normally he buys for $0.40 and sells for $0.50 but the wholesaler was stubborn and the avocados were big so Stan thinks he can get away with selling them for $0.60 this week
Watermelons: Bought 91kg
Passionfruit: Bought one grocery bag full for $1.40 per kg
Limes: Bought one grocery bag full for $1.20 per kg
Pineapples: Bought ~20 large for $1.50 each, will sell for $1.80-$2.00 each
Papaya (this is where things get wild):
- Bought 10 Ugandan papayas for ~$1.50 each
- Bought ~8 Kenyan papayas for ~$2-3 each
- Apparently Kenyan papayas are sweeter and better than Ugandan papayas
- He doesn’t directly sell papayas - instead he slices them up and sells them along with watermelon, avocado, pineapple, passionfruit, bananas, and beets in plastic mixed-fruit containers that are really good and $1 each
He also bought potatoes, mangoes, ginger, and some coconut
He didn’t buy any oranges but apparently those are flown in by airplane from South Africa