Starter Kit. Idea 214 of 500. Cluster 10
Iced-tea concentrate for restaurants, made here, branded here
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
Brew a concentrate in your kitchen at 3 strengths, bottle them, and take them to the owners of 10 restaurants and cafés near you. Ask them to make their own iced tea from it for a week and tell you what they would pay per litre. The proof is a strength they prefer, a price per litre and one standing order.
- Who pays first
- A restaurant or café owner who makes iced tea from powder or brews it by hand every day and wants something faster that tastes of tea.
- What leaves today
- Restaurants serve iced tea made from imported powders and syrups, while the leaf to make a better one is grown a few hours away.
Ask first
- the area Medical Officer of Health. Ask what a unit making drink concentrate for restaurants needs to be approved.
- Sri Lanka Standards Institution. Ask which standard applies to tea concentrate sold in bottles.
Check before you spend
Whether your unit has food approval for bottled concentrate, and how long the concentrate stays safe once a restaurant opens it.
Find out these three numbers
- What do restaurants pay now for the iced tea they serve?
- How many glasses does one bottle of concentrate make?
- How many restaurants would switch after a week's trial?
A comparison from the book
A Sri Lankan tea company. Chapter Four
"one Sri Lankan company that does its own blending and branding and packing says it gets more than 3 times the national average export price"
Blended, branded and packed here, tea already earns several times the bulk price.
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.