Starter Kit. Idea 272 of 500. Cluster 14
Buffalo-milk mozzarella and ghee for the hotels and for export
The mechanism, from the book
The smallholder sells raw to a collector at the gate and the collector sells to a packer who puts his own name on it. Denmark's farmers got rich the day they owned the creamery.
The first step
Ask a hotel's head chef what mozzarella the kitchen uses, where it comes from and what it costs per kilo. Then have a buffalo farmer's milk made into a trial batch of fresh mozzarella and a jar of ghee, and bring both back to that chef for a tasting against what they use now. A standing order, or a price the chef would pay, is the proof worth building a dairy for.
- Who pays first
- A hotel head chef who buys mozzarella from elsewhere and would switch to fresh local cheese if the quality holds.
- What leaves today
- Buffalo milk leaves the farm raw, and the cheese and ghee that fetch a hotel price are made by somebody else.
Ask first
- the area Medical Officer of Health. Ask what a small dairy unit needs before selling fresh cheese and ghee.
- Sri Lanka Standards Institution. Ask which standard applies to ghee sold in jars.
Check before you spend
Whether the cheese room has food approval, and whether the buffalo milk is tested for safety before it is made into cheese.
Find out these three numbers
- What do hotel kitchens pay per kilo for imported mozzarella?
- How much buffalo milk makes a kilo of mozzarella?
- How long does fresh mozzarella keep chilled?
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.