The Chandarana Foodplus Story: Nobody else’s money, its own limits
At the turn of twenty twenty, in Nairobi, a supermarket chain is being sold off in pieces.
Nakumatt had been one of the giants of Kenyan retail. Now it is in liquidation, and the people it owes want back whatever can be recovered.
What is left to sell is the furniture. The shelving, the freezers, the checkouts. The fixtures and fittings of its branches.
An independent valuer, a firm called Tysons, puts a number on those fittings. A hundred and ten and a half million shillings.
The fittings go up for sale, and some of the country’s surviving supermarket chains put in bids.
One of the bidders is a family business. It began as a single shop, sixty years earlier or thereabouts, and the founder’s sons still run it.
It has never listed on a stock exchange. In any source we could find, it has never sold a stake to an outside investor, and it has never published what it earns.
Its own management describes it as a company that grows slowly, on purpose. A company that does not chase.
For three years it has watched its biggest rivals fail.
That company bids two hundred and forty six million shillings.
More than twice what the valuer said the fittings were worth. For a company that describes itself the way this one does, that is a large number to put down.
The company is Chandarana Foodplus. Nobody outside the family knows how big it is.
And the result is not in yet.
THE DUKA
The shop is in Highridge, in the Parklands area of Nairobi, in a small shopping centre.
It is what Kenyans call a duka. There is a counter, and behind the counter there is everything.
Grains. Spices. Powders.
You do not take anything off a shelf. You ask, and it is weighed out for you.
It is poured into a brown paper bag, and the top of the bag is folded over and handed across.
In a shop like this the customer never touches the stock. Everything passes through the owner’s hands, and so does every conversation.
A duka is not a small supermarket. It is a different idea. The shopkeeper holds the goods, and the customer asks.
The man behind the counter is the founder, Shantilal Thakkar.
He serves the customers himself. The accounts of the shop all remember one thing about the way he did it. He asked after their families.
The sources say he saw an opportunity to offer products at competitive prices. One newspaper profile calls them a dukawallah family, a family of shopkeepers.
That is the whole of the founding as the record keeps it. There is no dramatic beginning, and we are not going to supply one.
Even the year is not agreed.
The company’s own materials, and one Business Daily feature, say nineteen fifty nine. Wikipedia, and a different Business Daily feature, say nineteen sixty four.
A twenty twenty two article calling the chain sixty three years old points to nineteen fifty nine as well. But the other year is in print too.
Five years apart, for the same shop, twice in the same newspaper. We could not find a registration record to settle it, so you are getting both.
Whichever year it was, the shop was small, and it was the family’s.
What the record does keep is the shop itself.
A counter, a scale and a stack of paper bags, and the owner asking after your family while he weighed out your grain.
That is where Chandarana begins. One shop in Highridge, run on one family’s money.
Everything that comes later is built on top of that counter, and as far as anyone has ever shown, with no money that did not come from the family.
THE RENT
In nineteen eighty nine, the founder’s three sons take over the day to day running of the business. Their names are Anil, Sanjay and Dipan Thakkar.
The founder is still there to have an opinion. Around the same time, by one account, there is an argument.
Anil wants to open a branch at Yaya Centre, a shopping centre in Nairobi.
His father questions the rent. It is high.
It is not hard to see why. A counter in a neighbourhood pays for itself one bag at a time.
A unit in a shopping centre has to earn its rent back every month, from shoppers who could go anywhere.
We have this story from one account and only one, so we will tell it the way that account tells it. The father doubted the rent, and the son went ahead.
The Yaya Centre branch opens in the late nineteen eighties.
In that account it is the turn. The family business stops being a counter and starts becoming a modern supermarket, pitched upmarket.
It worked. The son who wanted to pay more for a better location was right.
The rent the father doubted bought the chain the kind of store it would spend the next three decades opening.
Notice what the argument was about. Not whether to grow, but what a location is worth.
And the father’s doubt is the only disagreement inside this family that the public record holds.
At some point after that, and the sources do not say when, the business changes its name. Chandarana Supermarkets becomes Chandarana Food Plus.
The new name marks a change in what the shop is. It moves from dry goods to a full fresh food supermarket.
The rebrand is reported to have cost ten million shillings.
The format is food first, on purpose. The chain stays away from the large electronics and general merchandise that other supermarkets fill their aisles with.
It pitches itself on service, not on discount volume. The duka’s habit of asking after the family has become a way of selling.
In nineteen ninety nine, the brothers bring the branches under one central management structure.
That lets them run several stores as a single business, and grow it on purpose rather than one shop at a time. Before it, each branch is its own shop. After it, there is a chain.
They divide the work between them.
Anil takes buying. He decides what goes on the shelves, which in a supermarket is most of what the supermarket is.
Sanjay takes operations and stock control, the work of keeping those shelves full.
Dipan takes finance, information technology and marketing.
Buying, running, paying. Each brother has a part of the business that is his, and the parts do not overlap.
By every account we found, that division has held for more than three decades.
There is no record of a feud between the three brothers, in court or in the press.
The chain grows slowly. By around the middle of the twenty tens it has about eight branches. By around twenty eighteen, about fourteen.
After that it adds roughly two new stores a year. No one of those years stands out in the record. That is what steady growth looks like from the outside.
No source we found records an outside investor behind any of it. There is no listing, no bond and no disclosed bank loan.
As far as the record shows, the family paid for the stores with its own money.
So every one of these decisions, the rent, the new name, the pace, was made by people who answered to nobody but each other.
Two stores a year, three brothers, one division of labour. For year after year, nothing in the record changes.
THE EMAIL
On the twenty eighth of July, twenty eighteen, a member of the chain’s marketing staff sends an email to the managers of its stores.
The email describes a new promotional focus. The shoppers it wants the stores to attract are white.
The company would later give her name. She is Rita Patel.
The email leaks.
Within days it is everywhere. The public and the press read it as racially discriminatory, and they say so, loudly.
For about a week, the family chain is the news.
The Governor of Nairobi, Mike Sonko, orders the chain’s business licences across the county cancelled.
It is an order from the man who runs the city, given in public, against a business that has traded in that city for more than fifty years.
Legal commentators at the time say an order like that is likely unconstitutional without a fair hearing. An order is not the same as a revocation.
And no source we found confirms that any licence was actually revoked, or that any store closed.
Then a national body steps in. It is the only time on record that anyone outside the family has demanded that the owners answer in person.
The National Cohesion and Integration Commission, chaired by Francis Ole Kaparo, summons the owners to explain the email.
The owners acknowledge the summons. They do not appear.
The commission summons them a second time. They do not appear.
No source gives a reason, and we will not guess at one.
The commission says it will consider legal action.
That is where the record stops. No source we found reports what the commission did next, or whether it did anything at all.
The company’s own account had come in the first days. Dipan Thakkar, the brother who handles marketing, spoke for it.
The company said the wording reflected the employee’s poor grasp of the English language. It described her as newly hired, and it announced disciplinary action against her.
It apologised. The apology drew more anger, not less.
Coverage at the time was sceptical. As the press saw it, the explanation turned a question about who the chain wanted in its stores into a question about one woman’s English.
About eleven hundred people worked for Chandarana that year.
Across six decades, the public record names one of them below the level of store manager. It names her only as the person blamed.
No source we found has her account in her own words. None says what became of her job.
THE TENDER
From twenty seventeen, Kenya’s big supermarket chains fail, one after another.
Nakumatt collapses under its debts to banks and to suppliers.
Uchumi goes into steep decline.
Tuskys goes the same way, and within a few years it will be ordered liquidated.
The collapse leaves space behind it. Prime locations in malls, and the shoppers who used to fill them.
Chandarana’s own account of how it behaved in those years comes from Hanif Rajan, its senior operating executive. He is not a member of the family.
It comes from a newspaper feature about the company that was published in that paper’s sponsored section. We could not confirm whether the company paid for it, and we could not confirm when it ran.
In that feature, Rajan describes the logic of rushing to grab the space your rivals leave behind, the fear of missing out. He says it leads to emotional and irrational decisions.
The company’s position, as he tells it, is that it grows at its own pace and does not chase.
It is an unusual thing for a business to say in public. Most companies describe the space a failing rival leaves behind as an opportunity.
This one, through its operating executive, describes the urge to take it as a risk.
Rajan’s words are the only statement of this philosophy we found. Every explanation we found of why Chandarana behaved as it did in those years comes from him.
That does not make him wrong. It makes him the only witness, and a witness for his own side.
He also talks about the suppliers. After the collapses, he says, they became rigid and sceptical.
That is not surprising. Unpaid suppliers were at the centre of how Nakumatt and Tuskys came apart.
A supermarket that pays its suppliers late is borrowing from them. It takes the goods today and pays for them later. When the payments stop, the deliveries stop, and the shelves empty.
But no supplier is named in that feature, or in any source we found. None is quoted on what it is like to sell to Chandarana, or on whether Chandarana pays on time.
We are not suggesting that it does not pay. We are saying that nobody who delivers to it has said either way, and the idea that discipline is what kept this company alive rests on exactly that.
And because we could not date the feature, we cannot tell you whether he said any of this before the tender or after it. We can only set the two side by side.
So the company’s account stays the company’s account. One piece of outside evidence exists for how it behaved in those years, and it comes with a price.
In the last weeks of twenty nineteen and the first of twenty twenty, Nakumatt’s liquidation sells off the fittings of its branches.
The shelving that held Nakumatt’s stock. The checkouts its customers queued at. The sale is run by an investment bank, Dyer and Blair.
On their own, the fittings are worth little. As someone on the selling side told Business Daily, stripped off the walls, the assets had no value.
The money was for goodwill, and for the location. What is really on offer is the chance to trade where Nakumatt traded.
The independent valuer, Tysons, puts the fittings of six branches at a hundred and ten and a half million shillings.
Sold in a hurry, Tysons says, they would fetch seventy seven and a half million. The valuer’s figure is a price for the furniture, not for the places.
The bids come in.
Tuskys, itself failing, bids seventy million shillings for three branches.
Chandarana bids two hundred and forty six million shillings.
That is more than twice the valuation. The arithmetic is ours, and it is not close.
This is not a company standing aside while its rivals’ space is shared out. It is at the table, and it has put down a serious number.
It did not sit out the collapse, however its own account can make it sound. It came to the sale with money.
The company that says it does not chase is, at this sale, bidding hard. Not recklessly, as far as the record shows. But it wants what is on offer enough to pay more than twice what the valuer said it was worth.
Naivas bids four hundred and twenty two million shillings.
Naivas wins. It takes the fittings, moves into three of the premises, and carries the shelving from the others off to its own stores.
Chandarana did not go higher.
TWENTY-SEVEN OR TWENTY-NINE
In May twenty twenty, two months after the first case of COVID nineteen is confirmed in Kenya, Chandarana launches online shopping.
No source we found says how many people use it, or how much it sells.
Like every retailer that year, it adds masks and temperature checks at the door.
In October twenty twenty one it opens in Nakuru, bringing its fresh food format to the county.
In February twenty twenty two it opens its twenty fourth store, in Westlands, on Rhapta Road.
From then on, according to reporting on that Westlands opening, the chain starts choosing standalone sites in residential neighbourhoods over shopping malls.
It also starts stocking small electric appliances, a small step away from selling only food.
Today it trades in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Eldoret, Nakuru, Naivasha and Nanyuki.
How many stores does it have? The sources give twenty seven to twenty nine stores, and none of the counts we found is authoritative.
One shop. About eight. About fourteen. Twenty four. And then a range, because the sources do not agree.
At two new stores a year, the gap between the counts is a whole year of growth.
By any of those counts, it is the third largest supermarket chain in Kenya by number of stores, behind Naivas, which has more than a hundred, and Quickmart.
Third by count is not the same as third by size. A store count says nothing about how much passes through the tills, and a count is the only ranking this company can be given.
How many people work there? Around the middle of the twenty tens, about five hundred. Around twenty eighteen, about eleven hundred. In twenty twenty, more than seventeen hundred.
After that, there is no reliable number at all. The figures come from different sources, counted in different ways, and none of them is a published company figure.
Its share of the national market was estimated once, at about two and a half percent. That estimate carries no date, and nobody has updated it.
Business Daily reported an ambition to reach fifty branches within a decade. No source says whether that target still stands.
Then there is revenue, and profit, and what the business is worth. No source we found gives any of them. Not the press, not the trade trackers, not the company.
It is an odd thing to be able to say about a company this old. You can walk into any of its stores. You cannot find out what any of them takes in a year.
That is not because anything is being hidden. This is a private company, owned entirely by one family, with no investor, no listing and no lender on record. It is under no obligation to tell anyone what it earns.
The people who normally make a company publish its numbers are the ones who have lent it money or bought a piece of it. In every source we found, this company has neither.
Investors kept Naivas’s numbers in the newspapers, and creditors kept Nakumatt’s.
Nobody outside this family has ever needed to be told.
So in every source we found, only two sums of this family’s money have ever been put on the public record.
Ten million shillings, for a new name.
And two hundred and forty six million shillings, for a bid it lost.
The shop in Highridge is still trading. It is a supermarket branch now, not a counter.
It sits in a predominantly Hindu neighbourhood, and it does not stock meat.
What goes on its shelves is fitted to the street outside, the way the counter was once fitted to the customer standing at it.
Sixty seven years since the first bag was folded there, or sixty two, depending on which year you believe.
The family still owns it. As far as anyone can see, there is still no one else’s money in it, and still, in public, nobody has counted it. This is Asili Africa. Every empire has an origin. See you on the next one.
Key Takeaways
- THE DUKA. The shop is in Highridge, in the Parklands area of Nairobi, in a small shopping centre.
- THE EMAIL. On the twenty eighth of July, twenty eighteen, a member of the chain’s marketing staff sends an email to the managers of its stores.
- THE TENDER. From twenty seventeen, Kenya’s big supermarket chains fail, one after another.
- TWENTY-SEVEN OR TWENTY-NINE. In May twenty twenty, two months after the first case of COVID nineteen is confirmed in Kenya, Chandarana launches online shopping.
In this series: The Retail Collapse
Who took the shelf space when the chains fell?
Also available on YouTube — search “Asili Africa” or subscribe to our channel.