Coconut milk and cream in retail formats rather than industrial drums

A first step

Ask a coconut milk processor who sells in industrial drums whether they would fill a trial run of small cartons or tins with your label. While you wait, show a mock-up and a price to the buyer at a Sri Lankan supermarket abroad and one supermarket at home, and ask what they would order. Two orders justify the first run.

Who pays first

A supermarket abroad whose shoppers cook with coconut milk every week and would buy one from its origin.

What leaves today

Coconut milk leaves in industrial drums and is packed abroad, so the retail price and the brand are captured by somebody 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.

What the book adds

One nut, 15 businesses, and the only reason the island exports most of it raw is that nobody built the processing, the packaging or the brand.

In the book

• Ch. TwoAn Island Nobody Has Counted
  Rubber and coconut on the island's lower slopes and coast
• Ch. SixteenThe Bridge
  Nestlé Lanka's coconut milk powder, made at Kurunegala for the world

More from cluster 8

• 176Coconut water, bottled and branded rather than sold as bulk concentrate
• 177Coconut water jelly and other set desserts, a product nobody yet associates with Sri Lanka
• 178King coconut as a named origin product, the way Alphonso is a named mango
• 179Virgin coconut oil, cold-pressed, certified, in consumer packs
• 181Coconut flour and desiccated coconut for the gluten-free and baking markets
• 182Coconut sugar, treacle and jaggery from the flower sap

All 15 ideas in this cluster