Sereni Fries

Sereni Fries Ltd buys potatoes from small and medium scale farmers, processes the potatoes into fresh cuts i.e. raw sliced potato chips-French fries’ type, raw peeled potatoes-unsliced, potato wedges, lyonnaise and cubed potatoes and crisps. Fresh cuts are sold to catering outlets, and crisps (Tasty Bits brand) sold through consumer retail outlets in major urban areas of Nairobi, Mombasa and Nakuru.

The project

Sereni Fries seeks to address their main bottleneck concerning reliable potato sourcing and are striving to sustainably increase supply of raw material through farmer contracting, training, and by ensuring efficient processing operations.

Project Activities

• Contracting smallholder potato farmers and training them on Good Agricultural Practices, Post-Harvest Handling and Climate Smart Agriculture. 
• Establishing demonstration farms that will be utilized as learning sites for training purposes
• Improving the ability of supplier farmers to cope with climate risks especially erratic rainfall through practices such as water harvesting for supplementary irrigation, improving soil water holding capacity through organic matter and cover crops, and tillage with chisel ploughs to improve soil water infiltration.
• Improving the capacity of farmers to sustainably produce high volumes of quality potatoes. This will involve adoption of practices such as suitable context inputs to minimize abuse of chemical pesticides, improved potato seed, crop rotation to reduce pest and disease build up, and proper post-harvest handling to reduce waste.
• Improving processing efficiency by automating the current processing process that is currently undertaken through manual processes.
• Increase cold storage capacity enabling Sereni to off-take more produce from smallholder farmers during glut periods.