Starter Kit. Idea 130 of 500. Cluster 6
Spice oils and extracts rather than raw spice
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
Ask a distiller of essential oils in your area what it would cost to distil a trial batch of one spice oil, clove, pepper or cinnamon leaf. Take the price per litre to a flavouring or cosmetics buyer abroad, found through a trade directory, and ask what they would pay for it. The gap between those two numbers is the business.
- Who pays first
- A flavouring or cosmetics firm abroad that buys spice oils and wants a traceable source with the origin on the documents.
- What leaves today
- Spices leave as whole or dried raw material, and the distilling, which multiplies the value per kilo, is done by the buyer abroad.
Ask first
- Department of Export Agriculture. Ask what support exists for distilling oils from spices.
- Sri Lanka Export Development Board. Ask which markets buy spice oils and extracts.
Check before you spend
That the distilling equipment is safe, that oils meet buyers' purity tests, and what labels and certificates each market expects.
Find out these three numbers
- What do buyers pay per litre for spice oils?
- How much raw spice makes one litre of oil?
- What does a small distiller cost?
A comparison from the book
Cinnamon. Chapter Four
"The buyer grinds it, blends it, brands it, and sells it on"
Do the next step yourself instead of selling it to the buyer who does.
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.