KENYA – Chandarana Food Plus, the Kenyan retail and grocery store has been accused of planning a marketing strategy targeting “white customers” only, enticing criticism from the public and the county government.
The email is said to have come from one of their hires in the marketing department circulated to managers on how to target white customers to their grocery and food stores, reported Business Daily.
Part of the email address read: “We are delighted to inform you that our supermarket chain would like to give you free vouchers to winner/raffles/best performer/runners up candidate in upcoming events.
As we are now focusing on white people to attract our supermarkets.”
The supermarket has since apologized blaming the incident on the marketing specialist saying the email did not reflect on the chain’s values, insisting they have been serving all the Kenyan demographics over the last 50 years.
“Chandarana Foodplus would like to sincerely apologise for the unfortunate and insensitive narrative written on email by one of our very new and recent hires in the marketing department,” the statement read in part.
“Her lack of proficiency in English is an easy way to justify this horrendous error, while this is actually the case it really does not make it excusable in any way.”
The supermarket management said disciplinary action had been taken against the employee who drafted the Chandarana Foodplus racist promotion.
‘Illegal’ revocation
Following a public fury and outcry on the supermarket chain’s misgivings, Nairobi governor Mike Sonko came out to order revocation of the business licences of the retailer.
But this has been faulted by legal experts who claimed the governor had no powers to singlehandedly close down the supermarket outlets, and should follow procedures according to the law.
Chandarana Foodplus supermarkets however continues to operate despite of the closure directive.
