Heritage, in the open
Sand River Ranch sits in Sultan Hamud, Makueni County — on the Mombasa Road corridor toward Amboseli, about 20 minutes from the Emali SGR station. It's a working feedlot built on savanna grass, not a showpiece: the cattle here are raised the way cattle have always been raised on this land, just with better records.
The herd is a mix of Boran, Sahiwal, Brahman, Angus, Simmental and Charolais crosses, sourced through a contract-backgrounding program with farmer-partners across Machakos, Makueni, Kajiado, Taita Taveta and Laikipia. Every animal arrives with full dietary and veterinary records — not livestock-market stock, but cattle whose history is known from the start. Cattle are the core of it, though a growing flock of sheep and goats runs the same land under the same record-keeping.
“I left fintech because I wanted to build something you could put your hands on — land, cattle, a place people actually visit.” Imani Wamai, Founder & Managing Director
Imani spent his early career in fintech and data analytics before leaving to build Sand River Ranch from the ground up. That background shows up less in the cattle than in the systems around them — the record-keeping, the traceability, the discipline of knowing exactly where everything came from. The ranch, the processor, and the retail deli in Nairobi operate as one connected chain, built by design rather than by accident.
What started as a feedlot has grown into three things at once: a working ranch, a farm stay for people who want a real countryside weekend, and Kenya's first cow-to-code traceability system — a way to scan a package and meet the actual animal it came from. Different doors, same place.