Java House (Kenya): From a single coffee shop on Adams Arcade to a pan-African chain — and the private-equity ride that followed
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Two Americans were named Kevin Ashley and Jon Wagner. Ashley had spent the previous decade flying United Nations relief missions into the South Sudan civil war. Wagner had been in Nairobi long enough to know that the coffee being served in the city's hotel lobbies was, by his lights, an embarrassment.
They took a small unit in a beat-up shopping centre called Adams Arcade. They taught themselves to roast beans in a shared kitchen. They opened the doors.
Twenty-six years later, that one café is a chain of around one hundred outlets across three countries. It has employed more than two thousand people. It has been owned by four different private-equity firms in just over a decade. And one of those owners is now in liquidation, owing the Kenya Revenue Authority almost four billion shillings.
This is the story of Java House.
