Coffee is one of the major industrial crops produced in Kenya. It is the fifth largest foreign exchange earner after tourism, tea, horticulture and diaspora remittances. Coffee is the mainstay of about 800,000 households mostly rural. In the 70s and 80s, coffee was regarded as the ‘black gold’ because it raked in millions of shillings for the farmers. Kenya was then top player in the global market and the high-quality coffee from Kenya was highly sought after to blend coffees from other countries.