Matawi Mead

Matawi, which means “branches” in Swahili, is an alcoholic honey beverage company headquartered in Cape Town, South Africa, which in 2018 experienced its worst drought in over a century. Matawi’s founders have brought to market a mead range, since fermenting honey dispenses with the need to irrigate base ingredients, confining water usage to production, which translates to less than 10% of the water required to make other forms of alcohol. 

Matawi is thus a for-profit venture with a clear environmental and social ethos: our mead range seeks, foremost, to contribute to water conservation, while securing the ancillary benefits of promoting responsible production and consumption, and creating a value chain to facilitate income-generation and employment opportunities for historically disadvantaged communities (rural women and youth in particular) to help alleviate entrenched poverty and inequality in South Africa.