Starter Kit. Idea 122 of 500. Cluster 6
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.
The 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.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Export Development Board. Ask which markets buy specialty chocolate and what help exists.
- Department of Export Agriculture. Ask which growers sell graded spice to small makers.
Check before you spend
Where the cocoa comes from and that its origin claim is true, that the kitchen meets food hygiene standards, and what labels need where you sell.
Find out these three numbers
- What do shops abroad pay for a bar of spiced chocolate?
- What does one bar cost to make?
- Which growers would sell cocoa to a small maker?
A comparison from the book
Cinnamon. Introduction
"where much of it goes into chocolate and coffee"
Our cinnamon ends up in other people's chocolate; make the chocolate here instead.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.