This has been another difficult month.

While the vanilla is encouraging, with more orchids having flowered and now developing into excellent quality beans, this is the time when we really need to kick off.

And the return of the rainy season has caused a big hole in our finances. A couple of you stepped up last month, but not this month and we are late with salaries. We have been relying on the Royal Spice Café for finances recently. Not through sales, because the traffic is insufficient and it barely breaks even. But each month one of the visitors gets excited enough by our project to invest. And the rains have meant few visitors…

Looking at our achievements, I am quite pleased. We have discovered how to grow vanilla to a high standard in our location.  We have begun the process of replacing the current host yes with fruiting trees to give us more value. We know when to harvest. We know how to deliver nutrition to the vanilla without killing it. We know how to process it to the highest standard.

We even know how to me make fabulous products from the vanilla.

This has completed the first major two phase of our growth.

We are now at the stage where we need to complete the factory to our needs and obtain the health licences for the products. The laboratory is not a important as it was. This is because we are focusing on selling our healthy products, rather than vanilla beans. While the laboratory is still very useful, it is no longer vital.

To date, our financing has been sufficient to cover our monthly needs as farmers. But building a factory… we are held back.

The lobster farm is continuing, sufficient to supply the café, but we have now solved most of the issues. The main one is not to disrupt the ponds!   It seems that our monthly draining of the ponds to count them was stressful. We lost 10% per month. Numbers are increasing.

But let me tell you about some of our wonderful products.

Our top grade vanilla is excellent.  It is in high demand but we don't have very much of it. We did have 100 kilos and we're now down to maybe 30 or 40. We decided that it was better to sell it at a high price retail rather than trying to export, it is worth it for the extra money that comes in.

Our first product is extract. Now our extract is very fine, although we do realise that we need three months for it to marinate in alcohol to get the best quality. Essentially it is five fold, whereas most extract is single fold; in other words it is five times as strong. However, We are limited in the amount that we have this year; next year we will have far more. And it takes us three months to produce.

Without the BPOM health licence, We cannot sell our extract as a food item or indeed as a perfume.  We can sell it as a mosquito deterrent. We really want to sell it as both: “Royal Spice scent: attract men, detract mosquitoes.”

And of course you can spray it on the food in a restaurant to make it even more delicious.

In our gardens, we have several sugar palms.  These enormous trees produce flowers which we can tap. We collect the sap from the flowers, and boil it to make a syrup.  A delicious syrup. When we add vanilla it becomes even more delicious.  We are negotiating with an Indonesian company to provide us with up to 400 tonnes of syrup per month on a white label basis.  Of course,  this would be without the vanilla addition.  But we can sell basic syrup at a reasonable markup,  and then sell vanilla syrup. At a much more profitable level.  Canadians are offended when I say it is like Maple syrup.  but after tasting it,  they always buy a bottle.

This syrup has several derivatives.  For example, we are using Mulberry trees to support the vanilla, and we can make a mulberry spread, not quite a jam. Other spreads we can make, which at the moment are delicious, pineapple spread and a quite superb chocolate spread.

No sugar is involved. Just our syrup.  The health benefits of this syrup are widely known.

Naturally, from these spreads we can make other products. Little biscuits, filled with pineapple jam and pierced with a clove. our own cloves, of course.

One of the successful support trees for the vanilla is the moringa tree. Moringa tea is well known, and of course, we make it. And then we add vanilla. We’re already selling this tea in the café, and it is getting a very good reception.

On the 15^th of February, we shall harvest the sap from our own trees for the first time. We shall then be able to start sales, but mainly from the café, which is legal. We cannot apply for licences till March. Then, we shall start to see income.

But this will not happen without investment. Many of you said you would invest more, but sadly so far it has only been enough for December and half of January.

Rex Sumner