James Ambani, Victorian Foods CEO, with fashion icon, KikoRomeo’s Ann McCreath, get a feel of VF.Leather
140 Kilo monsters like this beauty are common place to Victorian Foods. Unloading the catch requires muscle provided by Askofu (meaning “priest”, the man in the middle in a chef’s hat) and his able-bodied crew
Over 90% of VF.Leather processors are women from the surrounding community – trained under the watchful eye of Ira, VF Cofounder
CEO James Ambani thought VF.Leather was just another one of his wife’s entrepreneurial adventures…what a pleasant shock that turn out to be
Founded in 2013, Victorian Foods is a premier fish processing firm that was a frontrunner in Jade Sea fishing.
The co-founders, James and Ira, started out as fish resellers (brokers) who bought fish from Kisumu’s Dunga beach for resale to processers in Kisumu and retail customers in Kericho.
Following a string of disappointments that included dwindling catches from Lake Victoria, unscrupulous processors who failed to pay for deliveries, the couple ventured into fish processing, starting out in a backyard in an informal settlement near Kisumu, before setting up a fully-fledged fish processing plant at Maili Saba, a small town seven kilometers south of Kitale.
The founders commitment quality and punctuality soon caught the eye of several retail outlets stretching in Nairobi, Nakuru, Kericho and Eldoret.
The couple’s experiences in Kisumu (dwindling stocks and monumental fish wastes) haunted them prompting them to seek like minded organizations and individuals who sought sustainable solutions to exploitation of marine resources
Victorian Foods is an equal opportunity employer that achieved and surpassed the two thirds gender rule, in addition to being an active supporter of satellite communities in its core operational areas – Turkana and Kitale.