Idea 188 of 500. Cluster 8: The coconut, which deserves its own list
Coconut dessert cafés and product lines for visitors, so the story travels home
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.
Every idea in cluster 8 uses this mechanism.
A first step
Run a stall for a weekend in a tourist town selling three coconut desserts, each with a small printed card saying where the coconut came from and how the dessert is made. Offer a packed version to take home. Count how many visitors buy the take-home pack and ask each for an email to reorder. Those names are the start of an export list.
- Who pays first
- A visitor who ate a coconut dessert on holiday and wants to take some home or order it again later.
- What leaves today
- Visitors eat coconut here and forget where it came from; a café that tells the story sends home customers for the packaged products.
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
- 180Coconut milk and cream in retail formats rather than industrial drums
- 181Coconut flour and desiccated coconut for the gluten-free and baking markets
Idea 188 of the 500 in the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? Every one can be started by one person, one family or one small firm.