I started this business and had no idea so many people would jump into it. I started the business with the plan of selling eggs for consumption at Kshs 10 per egg. I decided to buy the incubator after I discovered that I needed to wait for about 2 months after booking chicks before they were delivered to me.
Now I have no option but to jump into the craze.
In the next three weeks, I expect to be getting 300 eggs per day. I will put them all in the incubator and I will sell the chicks. If I can have 200 of them survive per day at Kshs 400 per chick, that will be Kshs 80,000 per day and I guess it will not be bad and will only pray that it last for at least one month.
I know someone who gets about 1,000 eggs per day and incubates all. Do the math.
If you ask me, this is not a strange trend when you look at most businesses. An example is the mobile phones and accessories businesses and also the Safaricom agency. The pioneers of these in Kenya are all worth hundreds of millions and some more than a billion. Not many mobile shops are making good money today. Guys who started importing clothes in Thailand, Hongkong and Turkey made their money while most of the clothes businesses you see now are not making any money.
The prices of quail and quail products will come down but we must not forget that we still have chicken farmers who are making money to date. Some chicken farmers have already switched to quail creating another opportunity for chicken farmers because this may lead to scarcity. Even if the price of an egg was to fall to Kshs 7, quail business would still be more profitable that Chicken today.
It will be interesting to see how the demand of chicken is affected when the price of quail stabilizes. Will chicken consumers move to quail?
The fact that the amount of feed taken by one chicken is eaten by 5-7 quails and that quail can start hatching in 6-8 weeks and even hatch more eggs than chicken means that its products can be sold at far less price than chicken and still be able to make better profits than chicken. There are very high chances that there will be many people eating quails. Before the craze started, people were eating but the current prices can only be for breeders and not for consumption.
The above factors and others may just make this business last longer than we estimate. And lets not forget that this is in the food industry which will continue to expand as more and more people move to urban areas.