Green, Amber & Brown

A North-Peruvian company bets for harmlessness, the environmental conscience, and the identity. 

SULLANA, Peru - Visiting the Peruvian Northern and coming back without cheefles (fried green banana flakes), algarrobina (carob syrup), or beehoney, or the three ones, is almost like having it not visited. The products have been manufacturing and packing hand-crafted for generations, sometimes they were undetectably altered before inexpert eyes and tastes - the most. However, an entrepreneurship at the Piura's second largest city wants to promote harmlessness as its most relevant asset  and comparative advantage, it says to be already working about.

D'Calidad (With Quality in english, DC as in spanish) is a little company based at sullana City's Barrio sur and on the highest part of that, guaranteeing  the total purity of its products, a display thought on the most exigent preferences, adequate biosafety levels, and a marketing plan focused in generating identity inside and outside the community. It also pretends to pitch environmental conscience along all its value chain.

It was founded on February 20th, 2015, from the initiative of a companies manager with experience in the financial area, and a cardiovascular surgeon, after becoming enthusiastic about the growth of the natural products in Peru and around the world. According to DC's manager and shareholder Mario Sarango Mogollón, the products set addresses mostly towards exportation, some selected stores in Lima City, or gourmet market. "More than sales volume, I am interested on strengthening the brand,"  he explains.

Overall, Sarango expects to have faithful and happy consumers as well: "So we fuse quality , care the environment,  don't use synthetic chemical inputs for that." 

Like many little companies  in Peru, the DC plant is located at a neighborhood where basically families live, many owning  a business. But the DC space is exclusively dedicated to operations and bookings, where the most part of the process is made by programmable logic controllers, PLC.

This is an advantage for DC because it can attend big volumes in short times, something that a human chain could not make. Likewise the quantities are programmed by computer, it can be guaranteed that each container has exactly what its label says. This sets DC into a quite exploited business line in this part of Peru: already providing as well as packing products for other firms. (View the full process here).

What is still doing  with human intervention is the carob supplying and the care of the honey-provider bees. Of course, Sarango has been spending long months until finding a honest provider who guarantees  prime inputs with quality, without  direct or indirect agrichemical traces, but he tells the effort was worthy.  "Even I collected carobs by myself," he talks.

Regarding the bees, the company manages two apiaries or places to grow those insects. One is located to the Northwest of Sullana City, amid Chira Valley, and it is dedicated exclusively to rescue the ones those are being retracted by the human action little-by-little, while the second one, to the South of the city,  is addressed to genetic improvement combining species producing much honey but docile management. Obviously by safety, both ones are not in any urban zone but rural estates. [

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Predation And Uprooting
That seems to be good news for a national and international market that is coming back to natural products because of fashion or health, and  it seems to be on a sustainable growth, especially in developed countries. However, the DC business model has the deforestation as one of its worst threats. As much as the carob forests disappear, the production of honey and algarrobina will be threatened, because the Equatorial Dry Forest is the ideal ecosystem for the bees and the carobs to live together in a sustainable way.

Some providers, once starting a trust relationship with their buyer, begin to alter  the composition and even the product quantity. Add to this that the same farmers would be decimating  the bees population when burning their diapers, and burning them at the same time, because they need to enlarge their croplands or the fear to an eventual attack to them or their cattle as well.

The another threat are the agrichemicals those can kill the bees, or causing them mutations altering or diminishing the honey quality in the less pessimistic scenario. And those same agrichemicals can fly  towards the carob fruits , vanishing them the organic label.

El Niño events , affecting the whole Piura's productiveness, obviously also harm  DC because of the alteration  of the ecosystem and the road disconnectivity, increasing costs. Worldwide, the economic volatility on currencies  is also another critical point.

And in the background, one of the things worrying Sarango is the Sullana local who seems not to identify to what is own. so, if there is the affective disconnection, it will be impossible that one considers as part of the DC business model or others related.

Green Goals

One of Mario Sarango's dreams is reforesting the predated natural spaces, and conserving the green spaces in the cities as much as he can, and reaching the people to turn into an active protector, plenty conscious about the benefit they are tasking.

That means to change mentality because many people still believe that is the job of the authorities. In fact, the few school initiatives, like the rehabilitation of Marcavelica Children Park in Sullana Metro Area,  is literally withering because the indifference of the neighborhood.

DC could not calculate its carbon footprint yet, but the question would be how much the company could earn by this fact once it is known. At consumers level, DC is betting the glass to guarantee the harmlessness of the products and to stimulate the recycling of the containers. Its next step will be the cheefles or fried green banana flakes, which they will pack in aluminium-style bags. Although it is not clear how the environmental plan to be with the used packages, what it is actually clear the bananas  have to be organic.

If DC is not an unique example across Piura about how a little entrepreneurship is capable to conquer the national and international market, it is indeed a proof that the clarity of commercial and environmental goals are perfectly congruent and profitable. The two keys are a good planning and a high-standard work betting for reassessing and innovating the own. The first steps have been safe at least.

FACEBOOK: Learn wat's new about DC by following its fanpage.

© 2018 Asociación Civil Factor Tierra. All Rights Reserved. Photographs provided by D'Calidad.