Starter Kit. Idea 182 of 500. Cluster 8
Coconut sugar, treacle and jaggery from the flower sap
The mechanism, from the book
The whole-nut principle. Sri Lanka's coconut exports are growing, which makes this the one chain already moving. Almost every part of the nut has a market and most of them leave the island unprocessed.
The first step
Talk to a toddy tapper near you about buying sap before it ferments, and boil a trial batch down into treacle and granulated sugar. Pack them in labelled jars and bags naming the district. Offer them to a café for its desserts and to a health-food shop, then ask a Sri Lankan grocer abroad for a trial order. Repeat orders show which form to scale.
- Who pays first
- A café or health-food shop that wants a sweetener with a named origin instead of refined white sugar.
- What leaves today
- Coconut sap sells for little as toddy, while the sugar made from it sells by the packet abroad under other origins' names.
Ask first
- Coconut Development Authority. Ask whether sap collection for sugar and treacle needs any permission from them.
- the area Medical Officer of Health. Ask what a small boiling room needs before selling treacle and sugar.
Check before you spend
Whether tapping the trees needs the landowner's written agreement, and what food-premises approval the boiling room needs before you sell a single jar.
Find out these three numbers
- What does a jar of coconut treacle sell for in a delicatessen?
- How much sap does it take to make one jar?
- What does a toddy tapper ask per day for fresh, unfermented sap?
A comparison from the book
London. Chapter Seventeen
"in London pays £8 for an inferior one with better packaging."
The jar and the label decide the price as much as what is inside it.
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.