WHY NOT SRI LANKA? සිංහල

Starter Kit. Idea 210 of 500. Cluster 10

Smallholder tea from the low country as a named origin, the way coffee has named regions

Back to the idea

Written for this site as a starting point, not from the book. Rules and fees change: ask the bodies named below before you spend money.

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

Collect samples from 5 smallholders in the low country, taste them side by side with a local taster, and write a one-page profile of what makes that district's tea different. Send the samples and the page to 5 speciality tea shops abroad and ask whether they would list a named low-country origin. The proof is one shop that asks for a price list.

Who pays first
A speciality tea shop abroad that already sells coffee and tea by region and wants an origin its competitors have never heard of.
What leaves today
Smallholder low-country tea disappears into anonymous blends, so the districts that grow it have no name the world can ask for.

Ask first

  • Sri Lanka Tea Board. Ask whether low-country smallholder tea can be described by district on the pack.
  • Sri Lanka Export Development Board. Ask which buyers abroad want tea by named region.

Check before you spend

Whether naming a district on the pack is allowed and protected, and whether the smallholders agree to supply only that district's leaf.

Find out these three numbers

  1. What does named-region tea fetch abroad compared with plain blends?
  2. How many smallholders in the district would supply you?
  3. What do smallholders get per kilo of leaf today?

A comparison from the book

Ethiopia. Chapter Eleven

"Owning the name did not change who got the money."

A district name helps, but the money follows whoever packs the tea and sells it to the customer.

The test

Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?

WITH500BUSINESS IDEASTO STARTTOMORROW

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.