Starter Kit. Idea 207 of 500. Cluster 10
A picking-and-processing day at a factory sold as an experience, with your own kilo at the end
The mechanism, from the book
The Colombo auction sells tea by the lot to a buyer who blends it under his own name. Every step after the auction is where the money is, and every step can be done here by somebody who is not a plantation company.
The first step
Call the manager of a small tea factory and ask whether 6 visitors could pick for a morning, follow their leaf through withering, rolling and drying, and leave with their own kilo. Agree a fee per head that the factory keeps. Offer the day to guesthouses within an hour's drive and see which one books it first. The proof is a written yes from the factory and a first booking.
- Who pays first
- A guesthouse or tour operator in the hills whose guests want to do something, not just photograph pickers from a roadside viewpoint.
- What leaves today
- Visitors watch tea being picked from the road and move on, so the estates earn nothing from the most visited landscape on the island.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. Ask whether an experience at a tea factory must be registered as a tourism service.
- Sri Lanka Tea Board. Ask whether visitors taking home tea they made needs any approval.
Check before you spend
Whether the factory's insurance covers visitors on the floor and in the fields, and what safety rules apply near the machinery.
Find out these three numbers
- What would a visitor pay for a full day with a kilo to take home?
- How many visitors can the factory floor take safely at once?
- Which days does the factory run its full process?
A comparison from the book
A cooking course at home. Chapter Five
"One is a meal. The other is a story they will tell for 30 years"
A day of making becomes a story the visitor retells for years.
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.