My name is Cathryn Karanja, founder of Gatura Greens. After working in the corporate world in Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry, I amalgamated my love for travel, my experince in FMCG and my family's rich history in tea farming to create a niche rural tourism experience in Kenya.

Cathryn Karanja -Founder

The story of Gatura Greens begun in 1959 when my grandfather, Bedan Kinyanjui, planted his first tea bush on the slopes of the Aberdare Mountains, being one of the first few black people in Kenya allowed to plant tea for commercial purposes at the time.

Bedan Kinyanjui - Grandfather

He passed his love for tea farming to my father, Karanja Kinyanjui, who caught wind of a new development in the tea industry, Purple Tea. He found a way to get his hands on this prized possession and became the World's first ever commercial Purple Tea grower.

Karanja Kinyanjui - Father

He then went on to build a specialty cottage tea factory in 2016, where they process several variants of tea for export, including Purple Tea, Green Tea and Black Tea.

Today, over six decades later, combining my love for travel and novel experiences,I ventured into tea-tourism by curating an adventurous and intimate Purple Tea Farm Tour, sharing my family's love for tea through Gatura Greens, our beautiful farm on the slopes of the Aberdare mountain ranges.

Working alongside my family to create this beautiful experience in our ancestral land has been the most fulfilling work I've done yet, and I hope that once you pay us a visit, you get to experience some of that magic too!

Not stopping there, my sister Mercy and I went into tea value addition, sharing our family's love for delicious specialty teas with the world through BREW IT, our luxury speciality tea line.