Steve Mburu: High demand for groundnuts pushed me to invent a groundnut roasting machine
Steve Mburu stands next to the packing machine he built in 2023.
They say necessity is the mother of invention - and for Steve Mburu, it was the driving force behind his entrepreneurial journey.
When Mburu started his groundnut roasting business in 2014, he quickly realised that sustaining it would require more than just hard work - it would require innovation.
Faced with resource constraints and inefficiencies, he set out to invent systems that would streamline operations and reduce losses. But the road to his breakthrough was anything but smooth.
"After graduating from high school in 2011, I took on several odd jobs - selling clothes, roasting and selling groundnuts, and later working as a driver until that job ended," Mburu says.
Steve Mburu manually seals some of the peanuts he has packed.
Hoping for a fresh start, he turned to a friend in Nakuru for help, but things did not work out. With no support and few options, he started again - this time with a boda boda (bicycle taxi) business and roasting groundnuts on the side.
When he compared the income from the two businesses, Mburu decided to focus entirely on groundnuts. With just Sh250, a jiko (charcoal stove) and sufurias (cooking pots), he restarted his roasting business.
Within a year, the business had grown to the point where he could employ staff.
But as demand grew, manual roasting became a bottleneck.
"Roasting 2kg of peanuts took one person two and a half hours. A 20kg order meant I had to employ five people to meet the demand," he explains.
It was exhausting, costly and inefficient. That's when he knew it was time to mechanise.
In 2016, Mburu started developing a roasting machine. It took more than 15 prototypes before he landed on the right design.
Steve Mburu during the interview at his shop in Njoro.
Early versions lacked capacity or burned the nuts. Adding motors helped, but charcoal remained problematic - it was expensive, often unavailable and emitted too much carbon.
"I found that using gas and electricity cost only Sh20 more than charcoal and was far more efficient," he says.
By the end of the year, he had built a machine that could roast up to 50kg of peanuts in just over two hours - a task that had previously taken 20 people.
Steve Mburu packing groundnuts with the machine he made.
But packaging was another challenge.
"In 2023, it took seven people two full days to package 50 kg of peanuts," he says.
Once again, innovation came to the rescue. He developed a packaging machine that now handles the same volume in just three to five hours - automatically measuring portions and leaving only the sealing to his team.
Steve Mburu feeding raw groundnuts into the roaster, a machine he made.
Today, Mburu runs Meiva Doz with a lean staff of five. His market has grown far beyond his base in Njoro, Nakuru, reaching customers in Baringo, Mombasa, Narok and other regions.
He's now working on a fully automated machine that will do the roasting to packaging in one seamless process.
Looking ahead, he plans to expand into value-added products such as peanut butter and dreams of sharing his machine-building skills with others - all self-taught, with no formal engineering training.