Setting Up a Soft Drinks Manufacturing Business in Kenya: A Legal Guide

Kenya’s soft drinks sector, covering carbonated soft drinks, flavoured waters, fruit juices and other non-alcoholic beverages, is one of the most heavily regulated segments of the food and beverage industry. A prospective manufacturer must satisfy a product standards and certification regime run by the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS), food safety and labelling rules under the Public Health Act and the Food, Drugs and Chemical Substances Act, excise duty obligations administered by the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), and environmental licensing requirements enforced by the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) and the Water Resources Authority (WRA). Getting the sequencing wrong, for example commissioning a bottling line before an environmental impact assessment licence is in hand, can delay a plant’s opening by months. This guide sets out the legal framework a soft drinks manufacturer needs to work through before and after production begins.

KEBS Product Standards and Mandatory Certification

The Standards Act (Cap. 496) gives the Cabinet Secretary power, on the advice of the National Standards Council, to declare a Kenya Standard compulsory: once an order is gazetted under section 9(2), no person may manufacture or sell the affected commodity unless it complies with that standard, and doing so is an offence under section 9(4). Separately, section 10 governs the Standardization Mark. Under section 10(3) and (4), a manufacturer wishing to use the mark must notify KEBS in the prescribed form, and KEBS then issues a permit to use it once the product is shown to comply. Section 10(6) makes it unlawful to apply the mark without a permit or where the commodity does not comply with the relevant Kenya Standard, and section 10(8) makes contravention an offence. In practice, this means a soft drinks manufacturer applies through KEBS’s KIMS portal, pays fees calculated against the enterprise’s turnover band, undergoes a factory inspection and product sampling, and, if the samples pass, receives a Standardization Mark (S-Mark) permit valid for two years.

KEBS also operates the Diamond Mark (D-Mark), a higher-tier certification that is not compulsory but is attractive to larger manufacturers: it requires three compliant test reports from the preceding nine months, a more detailed factory evaluation of quality controls and equipment calibration, and approval by KEBS’s Permit Approval Committee. A D-Mark permit runs for four years and automatically satisfies the S-Mark requirement without a separate application. Alongside the marks regime, KEBS maintains specific Kenya Standards for the composition and labelling of flavoured soft drinks and fruit-based drinks, addressing matters such as minimum sugar or juice-concentration thresholds, the additives permitted (referencing the Codex Alimentarius general standard for food additives), and restrictions on claiming “contains fruit juice” or using fruit imagery on a label where the actual juice content is low. A revision of the flavoured soft drinks standard was under public review in 2024, so a manufacturer should confirm the current gazetted edition with KEBS before finalising formulation and artwork, since a standard that is still in draft is not yet enforceable in its revised form.

Food Safety and Labelling Requirements

The Public Health Act (Cap. 242) gives county public health officers, acting under national powers, authority over the hygiene of food manufacturing premises. Sections 127 and 128 deal with the construction and regulation of buildings used to store foodstuffs and prohibit residing or sleeping in kitchens or food stores, both directly relevant to a bottling plant’s layout. Sections 131 to 133 prohibit the sale of unwholesome food, empower public health officers to seize it, and set out penalties, while sections 134 and 135 allow the responsible Cabinet Secretary to make rules and orders for the protection of food generally. A soft drinks manufacturer will need to register its premises with the county public health department, maintain the plant to the required hygiene standard, and be prepared for inspection at any time.

Labelling is governed separately under the Food, Drugs and Chemical Substances Act (Cap. 254) through the Food, Drugs and Chemical Substances (Food Labelling, Additives and Standards) Regulations. Regulation 4 requires every pre-packaged food, including soft drinks, to carry the brand or trade name and the common name of the product, a correct declaration of net contents by weight, volume or number placed near the common name, a declaration by name of any preservatives used, a declaration of any permitted food colour, a declaration of any artificial or imitation flavouring, a complete list of ingredients in descending order of proportion, and the name and address of the manufacturer, packer or distributor. Regulation 33A requires date marking, and regulation 31 requires the country of origin to be declared on the label. Because these particulars must be checked against the finished artwork before the first production run, it is sensible to have labelling reviewed alongside the KEBS certification process rather than afterwards.

Excise Duty on Non-Alcoholic Beverages

Non-alcoholic beverages are excisable goods under the First Schedule to the Excise Duty Act, 2015 (No. 23 of 2015). Manufacturers must register for excise duty and hold an excise licence, and under section 28 of the Act, together with the Excisable Goods Management System Regulations (Legal Notice 53 of 2017), affix excise stamps to bottled water, juices, energy drinks, sodas and other non-alcoholic beverages before they leave the factory; KRA has confirmed that unstamped products found in the market are liable to seizure and prosecution.

The excise treatment of this category has changed with the Finance Act, 2026 (No. 19 of 2026), and manufacturers should not rely on older rate cards. Before the 2026 changes, “bottled or similarly packaged waters and other non-alcoholic beverages” were taxed as a single line item at Kshs 6.41 per litre. Section 36 of the Finance Act, 2026 amends the First Schedule by deleting the words “bottled or similarly packaged waters and other” from that description, so bottled and similarly packaged water is no longer excisable at all, while other non-alcoholic beverages, which includes carbonated soft drinks, continue to attract excise duty at the same Kshs 6.41 per litre rate. The same section splits fruit and vegetable juices into two categories with different rates: unfermented fruit or vegetable juice without added spirit is taxed at Kshs 14.14 per litre, while the same juice containing added sugar or other sweetening matter is taxed at Kshs 20 per litre, up from a single Kshs 14.14 rate that applied to all such juices previously. These changes took effect on 1 July 2026. A manufacturer blending concentrate with added sugar, a common approach for cost control, should model its per-litre excise cost on the higher sweetened-juice or standard non-alcoholic-beverage rate as applicable, since the classification turns on the product’s actual composition rather than its marketing description.

NEMA Environmental Licensing: Water Use and Effluent

Under section 58 of the Environmental Management and Co-ordination Act (EMCA), a person proposing an undertaking listed in the Second Schedule must submit a project report, or in higher-impact cases a full environmental impact assessment study, to NEMA before financing, commencing or carrying out the project. NEMA classifies beverage bottling and food-processing plants under the Second Schedule’s processing and manufacturing industries category, so an EIA licence is a precondition to construction, not an afterthought. The process runs from scoping and an agreed terms of reference, through baseline studies and an EIA study report, to NEMA’s review with relevant lead agencies and a licensing decision, and it does not end there: a licensed facility is subject to an annual environmental audit once operational.

A bottling plant also needs to secure its water supply lawfully. Abstracting water from a borehole or river for production is regulated under the Water Act, 2016 and the Water Resources Management Rules, 2007, and requires a water use permit from the Water Resources Authority. The WRA process involves submitting hydrological or hydrogeological assessments, public notification and site verification, technical evaluation, authorisation to construct abstraction works, and a final inspection before the permit issues; permits run for five years and must be renewed. On the discharge side, NEMA separately licenses effluent discharge under the Environmental Management and Co-ordination (Water Quality) Regulations, 2024. An application must include a site plan referenced to Survey of Kenya grid coordinates showing the discharge and monitoring points, a characterisation of the effluent from a NEMA-registered laboratory, details of the plant’s treatment facilities, and the daily water consumption in cubic metres. A soft drinks plant generating wash-water, syrup residues and cleaning-in-place effluent should budget for on-site pre-treatment, since discharge above the prescribed standards is itself a basis for licence refusal or later enforcement.

KEBS Import and Export Certification

Manufacturers who source concentrates, preforms, closures, flavourings or bottling machinery from outside Kenya should note that KEBS’s Pre-Export Verification of Conformity (PVoC) programme applies to goods being imported into Kenya, not to Kenyan exports. Under PVoC, KEBS-appointed inspection agents test and inspect qualifying consignments in the country of origin and issue a Certificate of Conformity before shipment, and consignments without one face delays or rejection at the Kenyan border. A manufacturer that intends to export its finished soft drinks, whether within the East African Community or further afield, instead needs to satisfy the destination market’s own product standards and, where that market runs its own pre-shipment verification scheme, obtain that country’s equivalent conformity certificate rather than a Kenyan one. KEBS’s own testing laboratories and its S-Mark and D-Mark certification provide the documented quality record, test reports and factory audit history that overseas buyers and destination regulators typically ask to see, so it is worth engaging KEBS early on export plans to confirm what recognition, if any, exists between Kenya and the target market.