Starter Kit. Idea 123 of 500. Cluster 6
Ceylon coffee roasteries
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
Get one sack of green beans from a hill-country grower, roast small batches on a borrowed or second-hand roaster, and pack 250 g bags naming the estate. Take them to five cafés and offer a free tasting against what they brew now. Ask whether they would switch for a month at a stated price. One café saying yes is a customer.
- Who pays first
- A café owner who wants to serve coffee grown on the island and tell customers exactly which estate it came from.
- What leaves today
- Coffee grown here is sold as green beans or not at all, and the roasting, which carries the margin and the name, happens elsewhere.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Export Development Board. Ask which markets buy specialty coffee and what help exists.
- Department of Agriculture. Ask which coffee growers on the island sell beans of steady quality.
Check before you spend
That beans can be traced to the farms, that the roastery meets food hygiene standards, and what labels and certificates buyers need.
Find out these three numbers
- What do cafés pay per kilo for roasted specialty coffee?
- How many farms grow coffee you could buy?
- What does a small roaster cost?
A comparison from the book
Ethiopia. Chapter Eleven
"The money is in what Ethiopia did not control: the roasting, the shipping, the shops, the customer."
The money is in roasting and selling, not in owning the name.
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.