Waray goodies

In the past, former San Miguel Corp. finance officer Ricardo Collantes has tried business after business, only to quit after losing money in his investments.

"I was into poultry raising and lechon manok. I bought trucks for delivery of hogs and poultry. I lost big time in gold mining," he said.

This time around, Collantes is selling moron, a rice-based kakanin, and binagol, which is made from a rootcrop called talyan and he can’t keep up with demand.

Initially capitalized at P2,000, Kookai Delicacies is now exporting. Its most recent shipment, 36,000 pieces of binagol to Canada, has been priced at $10 a piece. Another order of 32,000 pieces will soon be exported to the United States.

"With more than a million Filipinos in Canada alone, there is a huge demand for Filipino foods in North America," he said.

Production

Kookai’s factory is based in Leyte, where the basic raw material is readily available.

"I contracted the yield of 100 hectares of farmland devoted to this rootcrop. This provides me with a steady supply the whole year round," he said.

The factory centers around a P1-million grinding machine, which maintains the uniformity of the texture of the rootcrop.

Production was given a jumpstart with a P130,000 seed money from the Department of Science and Technology- Region 8. The DoST also provided training for the improvement of production efficiency under its Small Enterprises Technology Upgrading Program, bringing down the company’s production cost by P15,000 a month.

"I experienced a 300% increase in production. Before DoST, I was only producing 100 to 200 pieces per day. After DoST helped me, the production rose to 500 per day."

Aside from binagol, Kookai can also produce 10,000 morons per day.

"The food business is very promising if you just know what to tap," he said.