"UK’s Tesco keeps ban on Kakuzi avocados"

Britain's largest supermarket chain, Tesco is yet to reinstate avocado supplies by Kakuzi as it presses for compressive human rights reforms by the Murang’a-based agriculture firm. The British retailer on October 11, 2020 temporarily dropped Kakuzi as its supplier of avocados pending investigations into alleged assault and sexual misconduct by some of its employees. The ban stands nearly a year later, even as sources told the Business Daily that Tesco pressed for deeper reforms to safeguard the rights of workers and the communities living around the Kakuzi farms...

The Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed Kakuzi this week pledged to accelerate human rights reforms to comply with international standards. “We are taking any issues on human rights extremely seriously,” Wilson Odio, the Kakuzi assistant general manager in charge of corporate affairs, told the Business Daily in an interview on Wednesday. “We are cognizant of the fact that going forward businesses will more and more have to observe human rights in the course of their operations. Kakuzi does not in any way entertain human rights abuse of any sort.”