Nakumatt is the clay I get asked about more than anything else in the shop. Which one should I start with? Is Crystal just White with a fancier name? Why is my Juhu pink when I’ve seen it sold as black? And why is a clay named after a supermarket?
For anyone who’s been around a while, you’ll know I did a short Nakumatt explainer last August. It did the job, but it squeezed eight clays into one paragraph and I’ve crunched through an awful lot more Nakumatt since. So this is the long version: one clay at a time, plus the slightly bonkers story behind the name.
It’s named after a mattress shop. Sort of.
Nakumatt started out as a family mattress business in Nakuru, Kenya. The shop was called Nakuru Mattresses, and if you squash that together you get Naku-matt. The family had come to Kenya from India in 1947, and over the following decades that little shop turned into the biggest supermarket chain in East Africa, with stores across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania and, for reasons I fully support, an elephant for a logo.
Then it fell over. Quickly. It had around 60 branches in early 2017 and was down to six by September 2018. Those last six were sold to a rival chain, Naivas, and in January 2020 the creditors voted to liquidate whatever was left.
So how does a Kenyan supermarket that no longer exists end up on a bag of Indian clay in a little shop in England?
The version passed around the community goes like this. In Kenya, edible clay (udongo, which is simply Swahili for soil) was one of the things people picked up at Nakumatt, so for a lot of buyers the clay and the shop more or less became the same word. Around 2019 a seller called Kilimanjaro Clays listed their clay online as Nakumatt. A few weeks later an Indian seller borrowed the name for their own roasted pahadi mitti, mountain clay, and labelled it Indian Nakumatt. It stuck, then it spread, and now Nakumatt on a label almost always means Indian clay. The Kenyan original barely gets a look in.
I want to be honest about how solid that is. The supermarket history is well documented. The clay part is word of mouth between sellers and buyers, and I’ve never found a written record pinning down the exact listing or the date. Which, to be fair, is how most of this niche’s history works.
What I do love is that a business built by a family with Indian roots ended up lending its name to Indian clay, completely by accident. In India itself you’ll still see it sold as bhuni mitti, roasted earth, which is a far more sensible name. Nakumatt is just the one that travels.
What actually makes a Nakumatt a Nakumatt
Underneath all the names, Nakumatt is a kaolinitic clay: mostly kaolinite, with a bit of quartz, mica and organic matter mixed in. That’s why the good stuff is low-grit or grit-free, and why so much of it has that cementy, wet-pavement character people either adore or can’t get past.
The thing that separates most of the types is fire. Raw Nakumatt is pale, cool and cementy. Roast it and it darkens, hardens and picks up smoke. Roast it all the way through and you get something closer to charcoal. Smoke it on top of that and you’re into tooth-testing territory. Colour is the other variable, and that comes from the ground rather than the oven, which is where Red, Pink and Juhu come in.
So I’ve gone roughly from least roasted to most, then the colour clays after. Quick note on Crunch Factor: I’m using the current 1 to 5 scale because that’s what’s on the product pages. Yes, the 10-point version is still coming. No, I haven’t settled on it yet.
White Nakumatt
This is Nakumatt with the fire left out. Unroasted, pale grey to off-white, and the most cement-forward of the whole family. If you want to know what Nakumatt is like before anyone’s done anything to it, this is it.
The bite is crisp and powdery rather than snappy, and the clay is very fine, so it doesn’t shatter so much as give way. It’s slow to melt, sitting on the tongue as a dense mineral paste rather than disappearing. Aroma-wise it’s clean and raw: damp concrete, cold stone, no smoke at all.
Plenty of sellers use White and Crystal interchangeably, and in my old explainer I lumped them together too. I’ve changed my mind on that, and I’ll explain why under Crystal. I don’t have a straight White Nakumatt in stock at the moment, but if you’re after the purest cement version of Nakumatt, White is where it lives.
Crystal Nakumatt
Crystal is the pretty one. Pale grey, sometimes almost translucent at the edges, with a faint natural shimmer that makes it look more like a stone than a clay. It comes in chunky slabs and fragments with flat, broken edges.
It’s lighter on roast than the darker Nakumatts, so the minerals do the talking: fresh earth, dry stone, a bit of dust. The crunch is firm and controlled, a clean snap that then breaks into a fine, slightly granular crumble, and it finishes cool and clean rather than smoky. Dampen it and it softens and holds together more, but you can still feel that grainy mineral texture running through it.
That granular feel and the shimmer are why I don’t treat it as the same thing as White. White is fine, pasty and slow. Crystal is crisp, glinting and a touch grainier. Same family, different personality.
It sits at a 4 on the current scale, so it isn’t soft, but it’s predictable, and to me it’s one of the friendlier starting points if you’re new to Nakumatt. Mine comes from Clays All Around.
Half Roasted Nakumatt
If someone asks me for one Nakumatt and gives me no other information, this is usually the one I land on. It’s been a bestseller since the start, and it’s one of my two personal favourites (the other is Red, below), because it balances roast and rawness without either one shouting.
It’s only partially roasted, so the outside crisps up and darkens in patches while the middle keeps that dense, raw clay character. You get both in every bite. Grey with darker roasted patches, irregular chunks, a loud crunch, Crunch Factor 4. The flavour is burnt clay, wet cement and petrichor, with a slightly cave-like, underground note sitting in the background. Dampen it and it goes soft and muddy without losing any of that mineral depth.
It’s the all-rounder of the family: interesting enough not to get boring, not so intense that you need a sit down afterwards.
Full Roasted Nakumatt
Take Half Roasted and keep going. Full Roasted is harvested, cleaned, sun-dried and then roasted all the way through, so there’s no raw centre left. It comes out dark grey with black tones, in irregular chunks of roughly 1 to 5cm.
The roast changes the structure as much as the flavour. It’s porous and noticeably harder than Half Roasted, and instead of a dense crunch it breaks into crisp shards that soften as you go. It’s low on grit and not sticky at all, which surprises people given how hard it starts out. Flavour is properly smoky and roasted, still with that cementy mineral backbone, a bit of petrichor and a faint metallic edge.
If Half Roasted is the all-rounder, Full Roasted is for people who’ve decided they want more of everything. It also comes as crumbs and powder if you’d rather skip the shard stage.
Smoked Nakumatt
This is the one I put a gentle warning on, and I mean it. Smoked Nakumatt is roasted and smoked, and it’s the hardest clay in my Nakumatt range by a distance. Charcoal to deep grey, with darker blackened edges, in chunks and the occasional slab.
The crunch is sharp and dense, it breaks into coarse fragments, and it finishes dry. The flavour is the moodiest of the lot: smoky clay, basement dust, warm asphalt and a faint petrol note that I promise is more appealing than it sounds. Dampening it barely helps. The outside softens a little and the middle stays as stubborn as ever.
I don’t recommend it as anyone’s first Nakumatt. Partly because it’s intense, and partly because I’d quite like you to keep your teeth. If your molars start filing complaints, listen to them.
Red Nakumatt
Red is where the colour comes from the earth rather than the oven. It’s sourced from iron-rich deposits, which is what gives it that deep red, rusty brown colouring, and it’s traditionally roasted on top.
Hard, dry chunks with a resistant first crunch that breaks into a dry, crumbly, slightly gritty mineral crumble. Crunch Factor 4. The flavour is deep topsoil and baked earth with cement dust underneath and a subtle metallic note, and the aroma is pure rain on hot ground. Dampen it and it turns into a muddy, earthy paste that hangs on to all of that flavour.
It’s my other favourite, and I think it’s the one people mean when they say Nakumatt tastes like rain. It’s also the base for a huge chunk of the treat world: sticks, cookies, cracker balls, stars, and a fair few of the mix-ups on my shelves.
One thing I want to say plainly, because I see it all the time. “Iron-rich” describes the colour and the mineral character. It does not mean Red Nakumatt is a source of iron for you. Clay can actually get in the way of your body absorbing iron, so it isn’t a fix for low iron, however much it looks like it should be.
Pink Nakumatt
Pink is the one with the reputation and the price tag. I’ve already written a whole post on why it costs what it does, so I won’t repeat it all here. Short version: the pink comes from natural mineral composition in specific deposits, not every batch comes out pink, and that makes it genuinely scarcer than the greys.
It’s also the most refined of the family. It’s roasted using traditional methods, but gently, so you get a soft, cement-like crunch with a dense snap that melts into something smooth and creamy. No grit to speak of, and none of the gumminess some clays slide into. Pale pink and grey, light earthy minerals, a gentle smoky warmth and a creamy clay finish. Damp, it goes velvety.
If Smoked is the one that tests you, Pink is the one people get attached to. It’s a bestseller, which is why samples are limited to one per customer. That’s not me being stingy, there just isn’t enough of it to go round.
Juhu Nakumatt
Juhu is the one that confuses everyone, me included, so let’s start with the confusion.
Mine, from Clay Rify, is naturally pink, ranging from pale through to deeper roasted tones. But go looking for Juhu Nakumatt elsewhere and you’ll find it sold as a deep black clay. Same name, very different looking clay. Whether that’s different deposits, different batches or sellers using the name loosely, I honestly can’t tell you, and I’d rather say that than make something up. Juhu is also the name of a well-known beach area in Mumbai, and I’ve seen people assume that’s where the clay comes from. I’ve never seen anything that actually confirms it.
What I can tell you is what mine is like. It’s bold and smoky on the surface, with a firm, confident crunch that snaps into small shards, and then it does something unexpected: it turns creamy as it breaks down, clean and controlled rather than dry or gummy. Deep earthy smoke, a metallic, cement-like intensity, and a roasted, grounding warmth on the nose. Crunch Factor 4. With a bit of moisture it goes fuller and creamier still.
It’s one of the most popular Nakumatts I sell and it’s still a fairly new line, so the colour and roast can shift a little between batches while it settles. Samples are one per customer on this one too.
If anyone knows the real story behind the name Juhu, please tell me. I’d genuinely love to know.
Why Nakumatt matters so much to this community
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say Nakumatt is the closest thing pica and geophagy circles have to a common language.
Spend five minutes reading reviews of other clays and you’ll see it. People describe new clays by comparing them to Nakumatt: a bit softer than Nakumatt, grittier than Nakumatt, if you like Nakumatt you’ll like this. It’s the reference point everything else gets measured against. Even when I was working out what my new Crunch Factor scale needed to cover, “Nakumatt-style crisp melt” ended up as its own category, because there isn’t really another way to describe that particular thing.
Part of that is texture. Low grit or no grit means it’s comfortable to crunch, which makes it an easy way in for a lot of people who’ve been put off by sandy, gritty clays. Part of it is range. Under one name you can go from raw cement to full-on smoke without leaving the family, so people can work out what they actually like rather than just whether they like “clay”.
And part of it, I think, is that it gave people a name. A lot of people in this community spent years being cagey about their cravings, not knowing anyone else had them. Having a named, searchable, reviewable clay that thousands of other people also love takes some of the secrecy out of it. You can say “I’m a Red Nakumatt person” in a group and a hundred Picans know exactly what you mean.
Now the bit some of you won’t like, and that’s OK. Because Nakumatt is the name people search for, it gets stuck on everything. Plenty of listings out there call any roasted grey clay Nakumatt, whatever it is and wherever it came from, because that’s what sells. Popularity brings mark-ups too, which I’ve had a moan about before. None of that makes Nakumatt any less good. It just means the name on the bag tells you less than it used to, and it’s worth asking sellers where their clay actually comes from.
On that note, my own receipts. Most of my raw Nakumatt comes from AJ Clays, who supply a lot of the popular vendors and are well trusted in the community. AJ says their clay is lab-tested, but I haven’t seen the certificates myself, so on my listings it’s marked Community-Tested with that caveat spelled out. Crystal comes from Clays All Around, and Pink and Juhu come from Clay Rify, all Community-Tested. I’d rather tell you exactly what I know than round it up.
Where I’d start
New to Nakumatt? Crystal or Half Roasted. Both are firm without being punishing, and they’ll give you a proper sense of what the family is about.
Love earthy and rainy? Red. Want smooth and creamy? Pink, then Juhu. Want smoke? Full Roasted first, and Smoked only once you know what you’re letting yourself in for. After the raw cement version? White, when you can find a good one.
And one genuine bit of advice: if you’re craving clay a lot, especially if it’s come on suddenly, it’s worth asking your GP for a blood test. Pica is often linked to low iron and other deficiencies, and that’s worth knowing about whatever you decide to crunch.
So where does everyone fall? Team Half Roasted, Team Red, or are you one of the Smoked lot with teeth of steel?
Ta x
Disclaimer: This is written for informational and hobbyist purposes. My products aren’t certified food-grade and I don’t promote ingestion. I do recognise that members of the pica and geophagy community may choose to crunch, chew or swallow clay, and any consumption is entirely a personal decision and entirely at your own risk. I can’t be held responsible for any adverse effects. This article is general information based on my own research and experience, not medical advice, and I’m not a doctor or nutritionist. If you have any concerns about pica, geophagia or ingesting non-food materials, including during pregnancy, please speak to a GP or another qualified healthcare professional.
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