West Kenya Sugar Company Limited is set to build a Sh3.86 billion distillery plant as part of a product diversification drive amid heated competition in its main table sugar business.
The miller said the plant will be built adjacent to its Kabras sugar factory, off the Kakamega-Webuye highway in Kakamega county. The Kabras factory, with a milling capacity of 5,000 tonnes of sugarcane per day, already produces 12 megawatts of electricity as part of a cogeneration programme.
“The sugar unit generates by-products such as bagasse, molasses, and press mud. To be economically and environmentally sustainable it is necessary for the sugar industries to convert these by-products into high-value products,” West Kenya said in a disclosure.
The miller said that the distillery will be designed for manufacturing extra neutral alcohol (ENA), fusel oil, and technical alcohol for 330 days a year from molasses.
ENA is the primary raw material for making alcoholic drink. It is a colourless food-grade alcohol that does not have any impurities. It has a neutral smell and taste and typically contains over 95 percent alcohol by volume.
Fusel oil is a by-product of the sugar-alcohol industry and can be used for several applications, such as solvents, flavouring agents for perfumes and spirits, and fuel.
Technical alcohol is a byproduct of the distillation process and is not for human consumption or medicinal use.
Technical alcohol is commonly used to manufacture cleaning solvents and fuel for alcohol burners and camping stoves.
“The unit will be based on advanced technology usage of multi-pressure distillation and will have the simultaneous provision of ‘cascade continuous fermentation’ as well as shall have fed-batch fermentation to handle a full quality range of molasses,” said the sugar miller.
Millers in Kenya are under pressure to diversify their range of products to cut reliance on the main table sugar whose pricing is under pressure due to increased local output and imports from the East African Community and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa.
For instance, local sugar production hit a record high of 84,042 tonnes in a single month in July as farmers continued to deliver record volumes of sugarcane to millers.
The record production meant that in the first seven months of the year, local millers made 468,594 tonnes of the sweetener.
This is an increase of 42 percent compared to an output of 329,628 tonnes during the same period last year, according to data from the Agriculture and Food Authority (AFA).
“The sugar industry has seen substantial growth over the past year, with total production in the first seven months of 2024 up by 42 percent compared to last year,” said AFA.
This comes at a time when there is a glut of sugarcane, which has put the State and farmers in a push-and-pull tug over pricing.
The government has set the price at which millers will buy the crop from farmers at Sh5,000 per tonne. This came following an uproar from farmers after the State had cut cane prices from Sh5,125 to Sh4,9590.
