Kathmandu Calling
Following the wildly successful Hetauda trip, the candy co-op plans to take our project a step further. In Hetauda, we killed two birds with a stone — we took care of certification and explored another market beyond Sindhuli. So what next?
The answer was obvious, Nepal’s capital city, Kathmandu. We had discussed this in the past, and decided 2022 was the year of exploring the Kathmandu market, and learning what the nation’s capital has to offer. So Kathmandu the natural next step in our research journey.
Laying out our Kathmandu plans
One of the biggest challenges our candy co-op faces is the short shelf life of Saughat’s products. But Saughat is not the only company that faces the challenge. Saurav Dhakal of Green Growth, for example, says they work with a baker who produces buckwheat cookies but the shelf life is only 10 days. “But we can find a workaround to that challenge,” adds Dhakal, “If the shelf-life is short, we work with it as a given. We take pre-orders for the cookies.” The cookies have been selling well, and there is a lesson for us in this as well.
Rather than going by the traditional method of selling we would work around such barriers through new methods of sales. When we are in Kathmandu, our plan is to meet and learn from this baker.
Talking to other food business professionals would also be a good way to go about expanding the business as our candy-making business is currently so small-scale. Learning how to improve the flavor, change the shapes around, and just play with the recipe until it’s perfect could be a wonderful opportunity for the co-op.
Shaping our story
The candyco-op has wanted to scale-up, expanding the business into a mass market product — and while that may be one way to go in Sindhuli and surrounding areas, Green Growth offers a different approach that has been tailored to Kathmandu. Green Growth is all about honing in on the individuality of small businesses who produce niche products.rather than expanding them into market moguls.
For a small business there is also the issue of appeal. In order to appeal to others through Green Growth the milk candy co-opwould need to build on the backstory behind the candies. Improving transparency by documenting the candy making process for our customers allows them to see the progression from makers to to market, which would allow them to feel more connected to the product. Basically it came down to this: if we do not have the power of a big business on our side we need to build a story around our small business to draw in its appeal. Working closely with Green Growth, we hope to have that opportunity to build that backstory when we are in Kathmandu.
Blockchain expansion
Green Growth also presents a fantastic opportunity on its own. If we wanted to draw out the story of our small business, one tool that would be helpful to us might be blockchain. Blockchain is a powerful tool using a series of digital blocks to track the journey of a transaction through the internet.
How would we use this for our benefit you may ask? Green Growth is currently using QR codes and experimenting with blockchain technology. The idea would be to make our products QR-code-scannable. This means that anytime a customer scanned a QR code that would be displayed on our packaging, they would be able to observe the journey the candies have taken to get to them. The specificity of this would even come down to tracing the milk used in one candy back to the very cow it came from!
Opportunities for Expansion
On our Kathmandu trip we plan to find opportunities for the women on our team to grow as entrepreneurs. Perhaps we could arrange a workshop for them to learn new baking and marketing methods or they could sit back and observe other small business owners at work. The possibilities are endless, and the real perk of doing work in Kathmandu is the larger market.
Future Plans
Going into the new year, we made a target for 2022. If all goes well, Product 0.1 would be launched in February of 2022. This would also be around the time our food certification would be ready which would allow us to expand our product accordingly.
But before jumping so far ahead, the next step for us is our Kathmandu trip where we can explore all of these new opportunities. We made a basic five-day itinerary for the trip:
Day 1: Travel + meet vendors
Day 2: Packaging + marketing
Day 3: Workshop with new producers in Kathmandu. Taste test kitchen and flavors workshop.
Day 4 :Talk to the already established market, get feedback- introduce Sabina and Sunita to all the vendors and networking workshop.
The trip would span over four or five days depending on the progress we make and by the end of it we hope to have a better idea of where to go with our small candy business.
