The glue that gave it away
Caleb Okari went into a Mia Duck outlet looking for household super glue. What he carried home, he only discovered after translating the Mandarin-only text on the tube himself, was an industrial adhesive engineered for construction and automotive body panels, a product whose fumes health authorities warn can cause dizziness, headaches and skin irritation without proper ventilation.
Nothing on the packaging told him that in a language he could read. Nothing warned him at all.
Okari’s tube sits on the same shelves, in the same stores, as baby products, skincare, personal hygiene items and electronics all wearing the Kenya Bureau of Standards’ Import Standardisation Mark, the sticker that is supposed to tell shoppers a product has already been vetted for the Kenyan market. It is a promise. Increasingly, it looks like a false one.
A law these chains are simply ignoring
The Weights and Measures (Sale and Labelling of Goods) Rules of 1999 are not ambiguous. Every mandatory declaration on a package manufacturer details, the product’s generic name, net weight, sell-by date, and safety or usage instructions must appear in English, Kiswahili, or both.
KEBS’s own standards go further: where a product’s original label is not intelligible to the Kenyan consumer, a supplementary label in an official language is required before sale, not after. There is no grace period written into that rule, and no exemption for chains still “in talks” with their Chinese suppliers.
Yet across China Square, Panda Mart and Mia Duck, the same violation repeats itself, aisle after aisle. Products arrive from Chinese factories pre-packaged, wearing the KEBS mark, and go straight onto shelves for households that cannot decode a single warning on them.
Blaming the shopper
Confronted about the practice, the three chains offered nearly identical defences. Mia Duck’s position was that customers unable to read Mandarin should simply ask a staff member.
China Square and Panda Mart said much the same that employees are on hand to translate. It is a tidy line, and it is also an admission: these retailers know their labels are unreadable to the market they are selling to, and have decided the fix is to outsource legal compliance to underpaid floor staff rather than the label itself.
A China Square representative went further, acknowledging that products arrive pre-packaged from Chinese manufacturers and that the chain has no choice but to “sell them that way” while it slowly persuades factories to add English text. Kenyan law was not written to wait on that negotiation.
Stephen Mutoro, secretary-general of the Consumers Federation of Kenya, has been blunt about what is really at stake: labelling exists precisely so a consumer can understand what they are buying and how to use it without harm, and a Mandarin-only label denies that right outright rather than merely falling short of best practice.
KEBS itself has now confirmed that selling imported goods before proper relabelling is illegal, and says enforcement including recalls, seizures and destruction of non-compliant stock is coming.
The regulator points to its Pre-Export Verification of Conformity programme as proof the system works, while conceding that non-compliance still slips through via mis-declaration and importer circumvention.
The Competition Authority of Kenya, whose mandate includes protecting exactly this kind of consumer information right, has so far said nothing at all.
Who is actually behind China Square?
The labelling scandal lands with extra weight because of how deliberately opaque China Square’s own ownership has been.
When the chain burst onto Thika Road in January 2023 undercutting Gikomba, Eastleigh, Nyamakima and Muthurwa traders by as much as 45 percent, its public face was a young Chinese national, Lei Cheng, presented in early coverage as the founder and sole owner. Company registry filings tell a different story: Cheng holds a token one percent of China Square Limited.
The remaining 99 percent sits with Fujian Festar Holding Limited, a Kenyan-registered entity controlled by two Chinese nationals, Lian Feng and Chen Xiuhua, who hold 60 and 40 percent of Fujian respectively.
Fujian was incorporated in Kenya on 25 July 2022 and China Square itself only a month later, on 19 August 2022 meaning the holding structure was built before the storefront that would carry Cheng’s face to the cameras even existed.
That structure meant the public face taking questions from journalists, trade unions and the Anti-Counterfeit Authority was never the entity actually controlling the business.
It is a template front a relatable individual, bury real control in a holding company that should draw far more scrutiny than it has.
A pattern of scrutiny that never quite lands
This is not China Square’s first brush with regulators, and the earlier episode is instructive less for what it proved than for how quickly public pressure evaporated.
Weeks after opening, the chain was forced into an indefinite closure amid trader protests and a threat from then-Trade Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria to deport foreign nationals engaged in retail trade reserved for Kenyans.
Days later, the Anti-Counterfeit Authority seized an estimated Sh50 million in goods branded “Finder” following a trademark complaint from a Kenyan distributor.
Within two weeks, the complainant withdrew the case, ACA verified the goods as genuine stock from the same manufacturer, and the merchandise was quietly returned. China Square reopened and has since expanded aggressively from one Thika Road store to at least seven outlets spanning Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu, with an Eldoret branch reportedly in the pipeline.
The lesson China Square appears to have taken from 2023 is not caution it is that regulatory storms pass quickly, and market share taken in the meantime is kept.
The labelling violation now under scrutiny follows exactly that playbook: acknowledge the problem publicly, promise a slow fix, keep selling.
Panda Mart and Mia Duck: same playbook, different wrapper
Panda Mart entered Kenya in January 2024 with a reported $7 million investment, taking anchor space at Garden City Mall in space vacated by Shoprite and Game Stores two international retailers that had already failed and exited the Kenyan market.
Marketed as a South African-based operator with a footprint across more than a dozen African countries, Panda Mart’s product mix of Chinese-manufactured furniture, hardware, electronics and household goods mirrors China Square’s almost exactly, and so, investigators found, does its labelling failure.
Mia Duck, the newest and least publicly documented of the three, has expanded with comparatively little scrutiny of its ownership or supply chain, even as its products carry the same unreadable Mandarin packaging onto Kenyan shelves.
Three chains, three slightly different corporate wrappers, one identical business model: high-volume Chinese imports, aggressive undercutting of local traders and established retailers alike, and a labelling regime that treats Kenya’s official languages as an afterthought rather than a legal requirement.
The scale of what is at stake
China supplied Kenya with a record Sh671 billion in goods last year alone, more than a quarter of the country’s total imports.
Even a small fraction of that volume moving through Kenyan retail with non-compliant labelling represents thousands of households handling industrial chemicals as if they were domestic products, applying skincare or hygiene items with no visibility into their ingredients, and operating electronics without safety instructions they can read.
The KEBS mark that is supposed to be a shopper’s assurance has, in these stores, become exactly the opposite: a signal of official approval stamped onto products the regulator’s own rules say should never have reached the shelf in that state.
What happens now
KEBS says enforcement, including recalls and seizures, is coming. Kenyans have heard versions of that promise before in 2023, when Anti-Counterfeit Authority raids made headlines for a fortnight before the goods went quietly back onto the truck.
The test this time is whether the labelling breach triggers sustained recalls and fines, or whether China Square, Panda Mart and Mia Duck simply wait out another news cycle while their branch counts keep climbing.
Until KEBS and the Competition Authority of Kenya match their rhetoric with seizures, prosecutions and public recall notices, ordinary shoppers remain the ones absorbing the risk one unreadable label at a time.
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