OPINION: What Trust in Meat Really Looks Like in Nairobi

In much of urban Kenya, buying meat is one of the most ordinary transactions in daily life and also one of the most consequential.

What ends up in the cooking pot passes through many hands, many rooms, and many hours of risk. Yet for most consumers, that journey remains invisible.

For many Nairobi residents, meat attracting flies is, counterintuitively, often taken as a sign of freshness. Some shoppers ask for meat from the previous day, believing that allowing blood to drain improves flavour. The purchase of meat is steeped in custom as much as necessity.

Families pass down the names of butcheries known for good cuts.  These practices reflect lived knowledge in a system where formal guarantees have historically been limited, and trust is personal.

Behind the counter, however, the risks are largely unseen. Research published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems found that approximately 72% of meat samples collected from Nairobi butcheries exceeded acceptable regulatory limits for Escherichia coli, while 84% recorded total coliform counts above recommended standards.

The findings point to contamination risks linked to handling practices, poor hygiene, and inconsistent temperature control. In observed settings, gloves were rarely used, and attendants often handled meat and money interchangeably conditions that make bacterial transfer more likely.

For consumers, there is no simple way to verify these risks. Instead, they rely on proxies: cleanliness, reputation, familiarity. Trust, in this context, is built through habit rather than visibility.

As Nairobi grows and meat travels longer distances before reaching households, those informal trust mechanisms are under increasing strain.

More hands touch the product. More time passes between slaughter and sale. The margin for error widens.

This tension between trust rooted in custom and safety dependent on systems—is increasingly shaping how food is sold in the city.

One response to this shift has been the emergence of neighbourhood butcheries designed around traceability and controlled handling.

The differences are immediately visible. Meat is displayed behind glass rather than left open to the air. Chicken and beef are handled and stored separately to reduce cross-contamination. Cuts are weighed on calibrated digital scales.

Cold rooms maintain regulated temperatures that are logged and monitored. These measures correspond directly to the most common failure points identified in informal meat retail: prolonged exposure to ambient temperatures, inconsistent handling, and the absence of clear separation between products.

Traceability, in this context, functions less as a claim than as a mechanism of accountability. When the path from farm to counter is documented covering origin, processing, storage and transport problems that emerge later can be traced back to specific points in the supply chain and addressed.

The implications extend beyond individual households. According to global estimates cited by the World Health Organization, contaminated food contributes to millions of illnesses and hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, with low- and middle-income countries bearing a disproportionate share of the burden. In Kenya, foodborne illness also intersects with persistent public-health challenges, including childhood stunting, which affects roughly 16% of children, and is linked in part to repeated exposure to contaminated food and water.

None of this suggests that informal markets will disappear overnight. Many independent butcheries operate with limited infrastructure and tight margins, making investment in cold chains and monitoring difficult.

Research continues to show uneven compliance with existing public-health guidelines across meat value chains. Formal systems are expensive, imperfect, and not immediately accessible to all.

But patterns do shift when reliability becomes visible.

Clean counters, consistent handling, clear separation of products and transparent pricing begin to replace guesswork as signals of trust. Over time, customers learn to associate order and consistency with safety, not just familiarity.

At the counter, the transaction remains simple. Meat is chosen, weighed, wrapped and handed over with a receipt. There are no bold claims on the wall.

What has changed is largely behind the scenes: controlled storage, documented handling, and systems designed to make responsibility traceable.

For most households, buying meat will always be ordinary. What matters is that safety is built into that ordinariness quietly, consistently, and all the way from farm to counter.

The writer, Percy Musyoki is the Quality Assurance Manager, Kenchic PLC