Starter Kit. Idea 223 of 500. Cluster 11
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, because the cassia arrives on the shelf as a product and the cinnamon arrives at the port as a bale.
The 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.
Ask first
- Department of Export Agriculture. Ask which distillers of cinnamon oil are registered and might supply small amounts.
- National Medicines Regulatory Authority. Ask whether an aromatherapy oil sold in bottles must be registered.
Check before you spend
Whether your oil needs registering for sale as aromatherapy, what the label must warn, and how a buyer abroad tests purity.
Find out these three numbers
- What does a small bottle of cinnamon bark oil sell for abroad?
- What does a distiller charge per litre of each oil?
- Which aromatherapy buyers would order after a sample?
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.