Indian billionaire Ravi Jaipuria's Varun Beverages enters Kenya with $32 million dairy deal

Varun Beverages, the Indian bottler controlled by billionaire Ravi Jaipuria, is entering Kenya with a $32 million (4.14 billion shilling) purchase of a dairy, juice and water business owned by his own family.

The company told India's stock exchanges on Monday that its wholly owned subsidiary, VBL Industries (Kenya), had signed a business transfer agreement to buy the value-added dairy beverages, juices and packaged drinking water operations of Devyani Food Industries (Kenya) as a going concern. The transaction is expected to close on or before Aug. 1.

The centrepiece is a manufacturing plant in Nakuru, sitting on 52 acres along a national highway with roughly 17,500 square metres of built-up space. It comes with reverse-osmosis water treatment, a boiler, an effluent treatment plant, a generator and an air compressor, and holds ISO 9001:2015 and Food Safety System Certification 22000 accreditations. The business includes Daima, a familiar dairy brand on Kenyan shelves.

Buyer and seller share a surname. Devyani Food Industries (Kenya) is a promoter group company controlled by the same Jaipuria family that controls Varun Beverages, making this a related-party transaction. The company told the exchanges the deal was struck on an arm's length basis. Analysts put the price at about 0.9 times the target's enterprise value to revenue.

Varun Beverages intends to start making carbonated soft drinks and energy drinks at Nakuru once the purchase completes.

The company is PepsiCo's largest bottling partner outside the United States, handling Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Mirinda, 7UP, Tropicana, Aquafina, Sting and Gatorade across India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Morocco and a widening slice of Africa. PepsiCo products are already made in Kenya by SBC Kenya, a separate bottler owned by Uganda's Crown Beverages, which has run a plant in Nairobi's Ruaraka since 2013. Nakuru would give PepsiCo a second, independent bottling site in the country.

Buying from within the family avoids the trouble that met Varun Beverages the last time it tried to crack East Africa. In November 2024 the company agreed to acquire PepsiCo's bottling operations in Tanzania and Ghana for $169.6 million. Both agreements lapsed in March 2025 when conditions precedent went unmet.

What followed became a regulatory case. Varun Beverages disclosed the Tanzanian termination only in a footnote to its quarterly results, prompting a complaint from the seller, Tanzania Bottling Company, to India's market regulator. The Securities and Exchange Board of India dismissed that complaint in July 2025, though it separately issued the company an administrative warning the following month for breaching listing disclosure rules.

The seller appealed. In January, the Securities Appellate Tribunal set aside the regulator's dismissal, finding that the termination had been buried in note nine of the accounts rather than announced as a material event. "This is no disclosure at all," the tribunal said, directing the regulator and the National Stock Exchange to re-examine the matter within four weeks.

Tanzania Bottling Company paid for the ambiguity. Absent a clear confirmation that the sale had collapsed, the Tanzania Revenue Authority treated it as completed, froze the company's bank accounts and compelled it to hand over $4.26 million in capital gains tax on a transaction that never happened.

Kenya presents a different competitive problem. Coca-Cola dominates the carbonated soft drinks market, and Tanzanian billionaire Mohammed Dewji's MeTL Group is building a $50 million plant in Mombasa to sell its Mo Cola brand at a fraction of Coca-Cola's retail price.

Varun Beverages has been buying across the continent regardless. It paid $158 million for PepsiCo's South African bottler Bevco in December 2023, picking up franchise rights in South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini along with distribution in Botswana and Namibia, then acquired the South African soft drinks maker Twizza in December 2025 and has since approved folding it into Bevco. A $50 million bottling plant is going up in Kinshasa, with a second under construction in Lubumbashi. In Zimbabwe the company signed an exclusive deal in October to distribute Carlsberg. Its snack plant in Morocco is running at full scale, and it now makes PepsiCo's Simba snacks in Zimbabwe and Zambia.

The core business is growing. First-quarter net profit rose 20 percent to 8.72 billion rupees, on revenue up 18 percent to 65.74 billion rupees. Shares closed at 494.85 rupees in Mumbai on Monday, down 4 percent, valuing the company at roughly $17.5 billion. JPMorgan kept an overweight rating on the stock after the Kenya announcement, and CLSA maintained an outperform.

Jaipuria came home from studying in the United States in 1985 to join his family's Coca-Cola bottling business. A family division in 1987 left him with a single plant, and he switched to PepsiCo. Varun Beverages carries his son's name and Devyani International, his fast-food company, his daughter's. He holds about 63 percent of the bottler. Forbes ranked him 260th on its 2026 billionaires list, with real-time trackers putting his fortune near $12.5 billion.

His other businesses are consolidating too. Devyani International agreed in January to merge with rival Sapphire Foods in a $934 million deal, creating a chain of roughly 3,000 KFC and Pizza Hut outlets across India, Thailand, Nigeria, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Whether Nakuru becomes the base for a wider East African push, rather than a modest dairy plant bought from a relative, will depend on what Varun Beverages builds there after Aug. 1.