How Kimbia Coffee hit the ground running

Ciaran Collins uses a very simple description to describe how difficult it can be for the even the most talented runners from East Africa to achieve top level success.

“It’s a little bit like children here travelling across the water to play for Liverpool or Manchester United, but the likelihood of ever making it big is about one per cent, so many of them don’t,” the 32-year-old Omagh man said.

So when Ciaran - himself a runner, having represented both Northern Ireland and the Republic internationally - visited Uganda for the very first time back in 2007 as a young student, he became fascinated with the talent and the skill of the runners out there, yet amazed at how they were struggling to earn a decent living off the land there.

Seven years later, towards the end of 2014, he travelled around both Uganda and Kenya, after finishing a stint working at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

“I’d been there for about two years working as an operations manager,” says the now Caledon, Co Tyrone, based Ciaran, taking up the story.

“I’d always been a runner myself; it started really when I was at school, and my brother Noel Collins and I were coached by Bill McCausland, and Omagh Harriers would have been our club.

“When you were going to the international competitions, that was when you would have met the Kenya runners, and they would have been miles ahead of you. So that was where my interest started really.

“Then, when I was watching the marathons, it intrigued and fascinated me how they were always so good.

“I travelled over to Kenya and Uganda on a fact finding mission, as I had wanted to set up a high altitude running club.

“There were so many athletes trying to make it, seeing running as a way out of poverty.

“I thought there could be an opportunity for us to try and help a lot of talented runners and expand the economic opportunities through the sport.”

It was through this desire that Project Africa Athletics was born; Ciaran set it up as a way of helping to support disadvantaged athletes from rural East Africa, and it was on the back of this, that the idea for Kimbia Coffee came.

“Myself and two of the Kenyan athletes founded Kimbia as a company,” he goes on.

“To run as an athlete like that, at the very top level, is a short enough career, and especially in the developing world, where there is nothing to fall back on after your running has ended, so to speak.

“So what we wanted to do was put a real onus on sustainable produce, help the athletes invest their money into produce that would sustain them long afterwards.

“And that’s where the coffee came in.”

Ciaran had seen farmers in East Africa growing coffee beans more for their own sustenance, and he realised that this could be carved out as a niche product; the athletes themselves could start to develop coffee in the areas of high altitude, and that there would be a market for this back in the UK and Ireland.

It has taken off, and the athletes are at the stage now of trying to promote their brand, which has, rather sentimentally, been named after their other profession.

The company has two master growers, Ciaran says, and their role is to teach the athletes how to develop their coffee.

As the Tyrone man explains, the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdown proved to be something of an opportunity for Kimbia to “really get off the ground”, with scores of followers on their social media requesting samples, and returning the gesture with words of praise.

“We were supposed to have had athletes coming over to run in races such as the Larne Half Marathon, and marathons in the likes of Belfast, Dublin, London and Jersey, but they all got cancelled.

“Those are races that the athletes would have relied on for income the last four or five years; that’s all been taken away now, so literally they don’t have a living.

“We tried to look at Covid as an opportunity. We do have a couple of guys who maybe only have a year or two left in running, and are coming to the end of that very top level, so they are really thinking now about what they’re going to do after this, for their families, in the longer term?”

As Ciaran explains, for some of those runners, that career ending could come as early as when they’re in their mid 30s.

It’s all the more poignant, that Kimbia represents not just the bean to cup journey, but indeed the bigger one, that which has seen the entire concept grow from a willingness to help give something back to people from the developing world.

That, plus the fact that it tastes amazing, and is organically produced, makes it, in my opinion anyway, desirable and a success just waiting to happen.

“A lot of our athletes aren’t even interested in receiving charity - they just want a good price for their products, and to be respected as athletes.

“They don’t necessarily want to be given anything, they want to earn it.”

*Check out Kimbia Coffee at www.kimbiacoffee.com, or on their Facebook and Instagram pages.