Confessions of a CEO, a chance encounter, and a new enterprise!

I was returning home from our office in Lusaka and pulled up to a red light when a young boy, probably under 12, appeared at my window and made the urgent plea, “I’m hungry”.  His face revealed as much.

I reached in my pocket and passed him a K20 (about $1.04) through the window just as the light turned green and I drove away.   After a few minutes more driving toward home I confessed to myself: I could easily have given him a K100 and should have.  He needed the money more than I. It was selfish of me.

I started to imagine the life that little boy lived.  How many nights did he go to bed hungry?  Did he go to school?  Were his parents still alive or simply too poor to care for him?  I knew he was not alone.  I see many standing along the streets, sometimes early in the morning as if they have woken from some secret place to begin another day of begging.

COMACO works with close to 200,000 small-scale farmers to manufacture surplus food crops into healthy, nutritious products and distribute them to retail stores all over the country. It struck me that the reality, however, is that few of these products, which we produce from surplus after the farmers have fed their own families, reach others truly hungry and malnourished people.  The products on retail shelves tend to be expensive, and these stores are too far away from where poverty and hunger grind away in Zambia’s towns and cities. While revenue from those products helps fund our food and conservation initiatives with rural poor and provides nutritious local foods to middle and upper-class urban consumers, our system does not serve the urban poor very well.

The chance encounter with that boy got me thinking, and soon a discussion spread among our staff.  We might not be able to feed every street kid, but we could at least try to get our nutritious and tasty products to more of the urban poor at prices they can afford.

With a determined staff and deep convictions, COMACO is now launching a new business model that links our farmers directly to low-income consumers in this way, offering the same quality products but making them significantly cheaper and more available to these populations.  By modifying our packaging, initiating direct sales through tiny neighborhood shops, and using new mobile apps for quality control, we’ll be able to lower the price by as much as 20%. This will give It’s Wild! products a reach we’ve never had before. Our new “Green Market Shops” will wholesale directly to the small shops where low-income consumers in need can easily find our products at affordable prices.

It’s a Zambian farmer-to-consumer solution, and a viable business model with soul. It also further supports our success regenerating soils and restoring forests in ways that both nourish the hungry and keep the environment healthy.  In ways like this, COMACO keeps trying to get it right.  If there had not been that red light and young boy in Lusaka, we might have missed this chance to do it better.

For helping us get our new model off the ground, I wish to thank the Zambia Bureau of Standards for allowing our innovations to reduce product costs, Partners in Food Solution for helping us develop new nutrient-rich products, and especially the Green Innovation Centres for the Agriculture and Food Sector (GIC) for supporting our efforts to scale our Green Market Shops.

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