Idea 122 of 500. Cluster 6: Food and drink as export, not just hospitality
Single-origin chocolate using Sri Lankan spices
The mechanism, from the book
Dilmah says it earns over 3 times the national average price for tea, because it does its own blending, branding and packing. The proof has been sitting inside the industry all along.
Every idea in cluster 6 uses this mechanism.
A first step
Buy cocoa beans from a grower in the wet zone and make a small batch of bars at home, some plain and some with cinnamon, pepper or cardamom. Wrap 40 with a label naming the farm and the spice. Offer them to a hotel gift shop and a café in a tourist town on sale or return. Whichever flavour sells out first tells you what to make next.
- Who pays first
- A hotel gift shop that wants a local product visitors will carry home as a present.
- What leaves today
- Cocoa and spices leave the island as raw beans and bark; the bar, where the price multiplies, is made somewhere else.
The idea and the mechanism are from the book. The first step was written for this site as a suggestion; if you know a better one, say so.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
The only test any idea on this site has to pass. The four rules that go with it are here.
In the book
- Ch. ElevenThe Mechanisms
What a brand and an owned variety are worth, from the kiwifruit growers - Ch. TwoAn Island Nobody Has Counted
The island's spices: pepper, cardamom, cloves and nutmeg
More from cluster 6
Idea 122 of the 500 in the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? Every one can be started by one person, one family or one small firm.