Road Trip to Malindi: Filming the Opening of a Fruit Factory

Every filmmaker I know loves a job that starts with a long drive. This one started with the road from Nairobi to the coast.

We were commissioned to film the official opening of Milly Fruits' new processing plant in Sabaki, Magarini, outside Malindi in Kilifi County. It's a factory that takes fruit grown by local farmers, including mangoes, pineapples, oranges and passion fruit, and turns it into pulp, concentrates and dried fruit for export.

I directed and edited the film.

The story I wanted to tell

Openings are easy to film badly. You get a ribbon, a plaque, a row of speeches, and a crowd clapping politely. It records the day, but it doesn't tell anyone why the day mattered.

I wanted something else. I wanted a film about growth and heritage: where this company came from, how far it had come, and what this new plant meant for the people who built it and the farmers who supply it.

The heart of that story came from the CEO, Mr Azeem. When he spoke about the company's journey, the room changed. It stopped feeling like a ceremony and started feeling like a story about how a company got here and where it was going. I built the film around his words, and around the faces of the people on the factory floor.

A different Kenya

What stayed with me most was the place itself.

In Nairobi it's easy to forget that industry is growing far away from the big cities. Here was a modern, spotless factory on the coast, with stainless-steel lines, workers in hairnets and blue overalls, crates of fruit stacked high, and machines most of the guests had never seen up close. Around it were the farms the fruit comes from.

Filming it felt like a glimpse into two worlds at once: agriculture, which so many Kenyan families depend on, and the slow arrival of industry in places that used to send away only raw produce. When fruit is processed close to where it grows, the farmer, the worker and the town all have a stake in it.

On the factory floor

My favourite moments weren't the speeches. They were on the line. A woman cutting her first mango of the day, focused and careful. Guests in borrowed white coats leaning in while a worker explained what she was doing. The quiet pride of staff showing visitors the work they do every day.

Those are the shots that made the film feel human. Without them it would just have been a launch.

What I brought home

Every job teaches me something. This one taught me about value chains, about how much work sits between a mango tree and a packet of dried fruit on a shelf thousands of kilometres away. It also reminded me why I love this job. You get to travel, you get let into worlds you'd never otherwise see, and you come home knowing more than when you left.

The road back to Nairobi was just as long, but I didn't mind.

Watch the film From Farm to Factory and see the photos in the Milly Fruits gallery.