Starter Kit. Idea 166 of 500. Cluster 7
Shared commercial kitchens certified for export, rented by the hour
The mechanism, from the book
The tiny business pathway. A rural woman with an exceptional product should not need photography, English copy, packaging design and a distributor before the world can find her.
The first step
List every small food producer in your district who cooks at home and would sell abroad if they had a certified kitchen. Ask each how many hours a week they would rent one and at what hourly price. Then find an existing kitchen, a closed restaurant or a canteen, whose owner would rent it out. If the hours add up to cover the rent, you have a business.
- Who pays first
- A home cook with a good product and a foreign buyer, who cannot afford to build a certified kitchen alone.
- What leaves today
- Food made in home kitchens cannot be certified for export, so good products stay local or leave as raw ingredients.
Ask first
- the area Medical Officer of Health. Ask what hygiene standard a shared kitchen used by several producers must meet.
- Sri Lanka Standards Institution. Ask what certification export buyers usually expect from a food kitchen.
Check before you spend
That the kitchen is certified to the standard export buyers need, that each user follows hygiene rules, and what insurance covers shared use.
Find out these three numbers
- What will a producer pay per hour for a certified kitchen?
- How many producers would book regular hours?
- What does certification for export cost?
A comparison from the book
Denmark. Chapter Seventeen
"It is Denmark's co-operative idea, small farmers getting a reach they could never have alone"
Shared facilities give small makers a reach they could never have alone.
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.