Varun Beverages acquires Kenyan dairy, juice and water business, Devyani Food Industries - Trendtype Africa and Middle East
VBL Industries (Kenya), a wholly-owned subsidiary of India's Varun Beverages, has signed an agreement to acquire the dairy beverages, juices and packaged drinking water business of Devyani Food Industries (Kenya) for $32m. The transaction is expected to close by 1st August 2026.
VBL Industries (Kenya), a wholly-owned subsidiary of India’s Varun Beverages, has signed an agreement to acquire the dairy beverages, juices and packaged drinking water business of Devyani Food Industries (Kenya) for $32m. The transaction is expected to close by 1stAugust 2026. The deal includes a manufacturing facility on a 52-acre site in Nakuru, on a national highway, with 17,500sqm of built-up area. The plant holds ISO 9001:2015 and FSSC 22000 certifications. It is also equipped with advanced water purification, an eco-friendly wastewater treatment system, and modern manufacturing machinery. VBL will also begin manufacturing carbonated soft drinks at the Nakuru facility after completion. PepsiCo brands are already produced in Kenya by SBC Kenya, a separate bottler owned by Uganda’s Crown Beverages, which has operated a plant in Ruaraka, Nairobi since 2013. The Nakuru facility would give PepsiCo a second, independent bottling facility in the country. Varun Beverages is PepsiCo’s largest franchise bottler outside the United States. Its PepsiCo beverage portfolio includes Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Mirinda, 7UP, Tropicana, Slice, Aquafina, Sting, Gatorade and Lipton Ice Tea. The Kenya acquisition comes after a failed attempt to enter East Africa through a much larger deal. In November 2024, VBL signed share purchase agreements to acquire PepsiCo’s bottling operations in Tanzania (SBC Beverages Tanzania) and Ghana (SBC Beverages Ghana). Both deals missed their long-stop dates in March 2025 without completing. The Tanzania SPA was terminated. VBL did not clearly disclose the termination, prompting India’s Securities Appellate Tribunal in January 2026 to uphold a complaint from Tanzania Bottling Company (TBC) and order SEBI and the National Stock Exchange to reinvestigate VBL’s disclosure practices. The fallout extended to Tanzania’s Revenue Authority, which treated the deal as completed and froze TBC’s bank accounts, forcing TBC to pay $4. 26m in capital gains tax on a transaction that never closed. The Kenya deal is a different approach to the same objective. Rather than acquiring a large PepsiCo bottler requiring regulatory approvals across multiple jurisdictions, VBL is buying a smaller facility from within its own family conglomerate. Devyani Food Industries (Kenya) is a promoter group company controlled by the same Jaipuria family that controls Varun Beverages. Kenya’s carbonated soft drinks market is dominated by Coca-Cola and local players such as Mo Cola. MeTL Group’s Mo Dewji is separately building a $50m soft drinks plant in Mombasa to sell Mo Cola at a fraction of Coca-Cola’s retail price. VBL has been expanding across Africa. It acquired PepsiCo’s South African bottler Bevco for $158m in December 2023, gaining franchise rights in South Africa, Lesotho, and Eswatini with distribution in Botswana and Namibia, followed by the acquisition of South African soft drinks company Twizza in December 2025. In the DRC, it is progressing with the ongoing development of a $50m bottling plant in Kinshasa (committed September 2024) alongside a second plant under construction in Lubumbashi. In Zimbabwe, VBL signed an exclusive agreement in October 2025 to distribute Carlsberg products as a test market. VBL is also ramping up food production: its snack facility in Morocco is operating at full scale, while it is manufacturing PepsiCo’s Simba snacks brand in Zimbabwe (from October 2025) and Zambia (from April 2026).