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Brookside Dairy Limited
Brookside Dairy is East Africa's largest milk processor, buying raw milk from farmers and turning it into packaged milk, yoghurt, butter and other dairy products sold in shops.
Brookside Dairy is East Africa's biggest dairy company. It buys raw milk from tens of thousands of small farmers across Kenya and the surrounding region, trucks it to factories, and turns it into the everyday dairy products people buy in shops: fresh and long-life milk, yoghurt, butter, ghee and cream. If you live in Kenya, there's a good chance the milk in your tea or the yoghurt in your fridge came from Brookside.
The business is a middleman with factories attached. Small farmers, many with just a few cows, have a simple problem: milk spoils fast, and selling it door to door earns little. Brookside solves that by collecting milk at cooling centres, testing and pasteurising it, and packaging it under brands like Ilara and Delamere. Shops and kiosks pay Brookside for the finished products, and Brookside pays the farmers for the raw milk. Its scale is the whole trick: spreading collection routes, factories and delivery trucks across a huge volume of milk makes each litre cheaper to handle than a small rival can manage.
That scale has a backstory. Brookside was founded in 1993 by the Kenyatta family, one of Kenya's most prominent political families, and in 2015 French dairy giant Danone bought a stake in the company. Brookside has also grown by swallowing competitors, buying rivals such as Molo Milk and Ilara. Today it competes with other processors like Kenya Co-operative Creameries (a farmer-owned cooperative) and newer players, but it holds the largest share of Kenya's formal milk market. Its real vulnerability is the same as its strength: it depends on a long chain of small farmers, and drought, animal feed costs, or bad weather can squeeze milk supply fast.
Saved answer · last researched 10 Nov 2026