Idea 223 of 500. Cluster 11: Cinnamon and the spice garden
Cinnamon-leaf and bark oils bottled for the aromatherapy trade under a Sri Lankan name
The mechanism, from the book
The imitation out-earns the original. Vietnam earns more from cassia than Sri Lanka does from true cinnamon by selling several times the weight, while the true cinnamon, worth far more a kilo, still arrives at the port as a bale.
Every idea in cluster 11 uses this mechanism.
A first step
Source a few litres of cinnamon-leaf and bark oil from a local distiller, decant them into 30 small labelled bottles, and send samples to 5 aromatherapists and essential oil shops abroad. Ask what they pay now for cinnamon oil and whether they would buy from a named Sri Lankan source. The proof is a price comparison and one trial order.
- Who pays first
- An aromatherapist or essential oil retailer abroad who wants a traceable single-origin oil and currently buys through distributors who cannot name the farm.
- What leaves today
- Cinnamon oil is shipped in drums to foreign bottlers who sell it under their own names at many times the price of the drum.
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.
In the book
- Ch. FourThe Same Failure, Four Times
Why cassia out-earns true cinnamon - Ch. ElevenThe Mechanisms
The single desk that ends undercutting and funds brand and quality
More from cluster 11
- 221Cinnamon quills in retail packs with the grade printed, since almost no consumer knows the grades exist
- 222Cinnamon sticks as a branded gift, tied and boxed, sold in every airport shop in the world that will stock them
- 224Cinnamon-infused honey, sugar and salt as a range
- 225A "true cinnamon" education campaign run by producers, aimed at bakers and chefs abroad
- 226Cinnamon farm stays in the south-west, a week on a working smallholding through the harvest and the drying
- 227Peeler training schools, since the skill is disappearing and it is the whole value
Idea 223 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.