Here is our story including the root causes of the problems and the solutions for local entrepreneurs who start from scratch. We sincerely hope that our people stop putting blame on our entrepreneurs, and keep encouraging them to keep going.

During our early stage of start-up, our coconut oil was 15$, then 12$, and is now 10$.

1st problem: price of raw materials
. Large amounts of raw materials in Cambodia are more pricey than imported ones. Surprisingly, why? Most farmers are poor, they grow their crops at home, mostly small amount. If producers want to purchase them at large quantity, they need middlemen to help collect and transport. Therefore, if we buy raw materials from 10 villages, we definitely pay extra cost besides raw materials 10 times.

1st solution: train the farmers
. The best way is to purchase raw materials directly from farmers or to not have many middlemen in the process. It simply means farmers are trained to communicate, transport, and prepare raw materials before selling them directly to us. However, training farmers is challenging since mostly they are illiterate. The process takes time and effort.

2nd problem (for enterprise starting from scratch): little money, small production
. In a developing country like Cambodia, most enterprises are at small scale. To reach large scale production, these enterprises must operate many times to reach the same result as large enterprises do, meaning high operation cost. More importantly, most financial institutions rarely trust these small enterprises enough to actually grant or loan them capital (mostly, they think these enterprises might not survive long, or why should they trust non-registered start-ups?). Therefore, the only way to survive depends on sales.

2nd solution: study more
. Instead of dropping the price of raw materials, producers can strengthen their technical skills got from study and research. Our team focuses mainly on our technical skills from chemical engineering degree to research and select the most up to date production techniques. As a result, now we can produce our oil with most up to date techniques (cold-pressed) with little capital as well as little time (2 days). Despite having little capital, we have strong engineering skills.

3rd problem: trust issue
. Beginning is the hardest part. With high cost of final products (even higher than imported ones) and little capital to register the company, most start-ups are not able to earn trust from both customers and any supporters. If they can not overcome this stage, the products will never ever hit competitive price.

3rd solution: be transparent
. Our team tries to explain each production technique, show activities of our farmers and sources of raw materials, raise the difficulties start-ups face, and the potential as well as our plan if we survive early stage. Customers who support us during our early stage despite high price of products are not rich, but they believe that such support during early stage is crucial for potential start-up like us to become established enterprise in the future.

“You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope.” – Katniss Everdeen