Turning a Profit on Juice
A former spy picks forbidden fruit and sells health in the produce aisle.
A tall, brawny Irish American walks into your office, puts a crystal goblet on the desk, and pours out a serving of a deep-purple nectar.
“This stuff used to be illegal,” he says in a gravelly voice. “We’re the guys who got the law changed. Twice the antioxidants of blueberries, four times the vitamin C of orange juice, as much potassium as bananas … Try it.”
Something like grape juice but heavier, not as sweet; tart but not as much as cranberry; dry, strong, and complex, like a good red wine. Meet Ribes nigrum, aka the black currant, and one of the misbegotten little berry’s most dynamic champions on American shores, Greg Quinn. As a farmer, a juice maker, and an entrepreneur, he has big plans for the super-fruit.
He hesitates to go down the list of the currant’s potential health benefits, he says, because it starts to sound like snake oil: improving night vision, lowering blood pressure, managing pain, and preventing Alzheimer’s.
The rest of the world has known about the black currant for generations, he points out. The fact that it is a stranger here, and just poking its head up now, is a story that starts, oddly enough, with the Vietnam War.
As a young broadcasting school graduate, Greg Quinn drew a single digit in the draft lottery, which meant an almost certain plane ticket to Southeast Asia. But after a battery of tests revealed that Quinn had an unusual aptitude for languages, an Army recruiter leaned across the desk and whispered, “How’d you like to be a spy?”
After 47 weeks of total language immersion and training, Quinn was off to the tiny German town of Rimbach, on the Czech border. There a huge mountaintop antenna monitored radio chat behind the Iron Curtain. But spying left plenty of time to sample the local cuisine. To Quinn, who grew up in a middle-class, blue-collar Connecticut household, the foods of Europe were a revelation. And what better way to learn to cook them, he reasoned, than by opening a restaurant? With the blessing of the Army (and discounts on food and liquor from the PX), he rented a space and went into business.
Behind the restaurant were six bushes with dark-blue berries he knew nothing about. Schwarze Johannisbeeren they were called in German—black currants in English. He started to use them in sauces and tarts.
Fast-forward: Quinn sells the restaurant, goes to New York, works in the food business for several years, starts a family (two girls and a boy), and takes up gardening. Soon he’s writing a monthly gardening column for the local paper, lecturing at the New York Botanical Garden, and appearing on Fox as the Garden Guy. He writes eight children’s books about nature, enough to provide a modest income.
Then Quinn’s three kids head off to school; he gets divorced and finds a new love, Carolyn, who’s willing to help him take his hobby to the next level. The couple find a 140-acre ex–dairy farm in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley, and Quinn is ready to become a citizen farmer.
With about 25 acres for cultivation, Quinn knew that if he wanted his farm to be profitable, he would need a niche crop that he could sell to?high-end restaurants. He started visiting his neighbors, farmers who seemed to be hanging on by their fingernails. Then he met vintner Ben Feder, who made specialty cordials. Among them was cassis, a black currant dessert wine.
“Where do you get your currants?” Quinn asked.
“Now, that’s a real problem,” Feder said. “I have to go to Canada for them. Because, of course, you can’t get them around here.” Why not? Because they were illegal to grow in New York. Of course.
That struck a chord with Quinn. He knew—and loved—black currants from Germany. And he vaguely recalled what had led to the ban—something about a fungus. So he did a little digging.
Harvested in the wild, currants have been used for centuries as food and medicine. In the early 1900s, there were more than 7,400 acres of commercial red currant fields in North America. Nearly half of those were in New York State, most in Quinn’s neck of the woods. But in the late 1800s, an Asian blight called white-pine blister rust?arrived in the United States. It thrived on two hosts: currants and white-pine lumber. With their industry threatened, lumber lobbyists fought to ban all currant farming.
But currants were already growing wild across the northern United States. And breeders had long ago developed new strains of currants and pines that were immune to blister rust. The feds lifted their ban in 1966, but as of the 21st century, 12 states still had restrictions on the books. Among them was New York.
Quinn went to Albany, the state capital, and began knocking on doors. He returned once a week, walking the halls, leaving his business cards, and begging for appointments. But he made little headway—until one day, a Wall Street Journal reporter interviewed him for a story. After it ran, state senator Bill Larkin’s office called to invite Quinn to Albany. Six months later, both houses unanimously passed a law allowing currant farming.
Quinn ordered seedlings from Canada and started planting. Now he just had to introduce America to the currant. Because of its strong, sharp flavor, the black currant was nearly always processed rather than eaten as a fruit. Juice seemed like the best option for reaching the most customers. The British product Ribena already did $200 million a year in the United Kingdom and Ireland alone and another $58 million worldwide. The pomegranate was showing the way in U.S. grocery stores, and açaí, a berry out of Brazil, was starting to hit shelves too. Neither was as high in antioxidants as the black currant.
Quinn started importing black currant juice concentrate to kick-start the market. Working with New Zealand growers, he combined varieties to develop a bottled concentrate called CurrantC. Now into its fourth year, CurrantC is making money.
Down the road, Quinn would like to fund studies and clinical trials to look deeper into all the health benefits—real, rumored, and legendary—of the black currant. “It’s a big deal in the world,” he says, “a super-fruit. I’ve got to keep spreading the word here. It’s just too good to keep it a secret.”
Getting Ahead with Greg Quinn
Q: How has your background helped your business?
A: I spent nine months visiting all the farmers in countries with the largest currant growers. The languages I learned in the Army came in handy. I do business in Poland. My Czech is close enough that I can stumble through, and it’s improving.
Q: What wisdom would you share with aspiring entrepreneurs?
A: Entrepreneurs see opportunities where others see problems. We’re willing, even eager, to take risks and are generally more passionate about what we believe in. The single biggest problem is that we are often terrible when it comes to counting paper clips or managing people. I would strongly suggest delegating the day-to-day management to the best people as soon as the venture is up and running.
Q: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
A: What I hear every time I fly: “Put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help anyone else.” You can’t help anyone if you yourself are struggling.
Q: Any tips for finding distributors for a brand-new product?
A: It takes a great product with a good story and a tremendous amount of shoe leather and hard work. Once we had our nectar in the bottle, we literally took it around in the trunk of the car calling on individual stores. When we had enough stores under our belt and some track record, we moved to the next level: taking it to larger chains and distributors and so on and so on.
Q: Do you have a business philosophy?
A: From an entrepreneurial standpoint, if you’re not passionate about an idea, don’t waste your time. There are too many other good ideas out there.
Q: How do you spend your downtime?
A: My favorite things are turning wooden bowls, fly-fishing, cooking, and gardening. When you’re starting a new company, however, these often take a backseat.
Q: Did you ever worry that things wouldn’t work out?
A: I’m more cognizant about what a failure will do to my employees and my family than to myself. The fear of failure is what drives me to succeed.
Reference Link
http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/turning-a-profit-on-juice/article140052-1.html
Courtesy
Reader’s Digest
Healing the Planet with Earth-Friendly Bamboo Products
The business she launched out of her garden bamboo plants could help heal the planet.
Jackie Heinricher’s love affair with bamboo started in her backyard. “As a child, I remember playing among the golden bamboo my dad had planted, and when there was a breeze, the bamboos sounded incredibly musical. It was my magic fort area.”
A fisheries biologist by training, Heinricher, 47, planned to work in the salmon industry in Seattle, where she lived with her husband, Guy Thornburgh, but she found it too competitive. Her garden gave her the idea for a business: She’d planted 20 bamboo groves on their seven-acre farm and had had some success propagating noninvasive clumping bamboos-the ones for small gardens (not the notorious runners that grow two inches an hour and take over the landscape).
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Heinricher started Boo-Shoot Gardens in 1998. She realized early on what is just now beginning to dawn on the rest of the world: Bamboo is incredibly versatile as well as very earth-friendly. It can be used to make fishing poles, skateboards, buildings, furniture, floors, and even clothing and bed linens (the fabric is as soft as silk). An added bonus: Bamboo absorbs four times as much carbon dioxide as a stand of hardwood trees and releases 35 percent more oxygen. If Heinricher could use her green thumb to advance a green cause, even better.
First she had to find a way to mass-produce the plants—a tough task, since bamboo flowers create seed only once every 50 to 100 years. And dividing a bamboo plant frequently kills it.
Heinricher appealed to Randy Burr, a tissue culture expert, to help her. “People kept telling us we’d never figure it out,” says Heinricher. “Others had worked on it for 27 years! I believed in what we were doing, though, so I just kept going.”
She was right to feel a sense of urgency. Bamboo forests are being rapidly depleted, and a United Nations report showed that even though bamboo is highly renewable, as many as half of the world’s species are threatened with extinction. Heinricher knew that bamboo could make a significant impact on carbon emissions and world economies, but only if massive numbers could be produced. And that’s just what she and Burr figured out after nine years of experiments—a way to grow millions of plants. By placing sterilized cuttings in test tubes with salts, vitamins, plant hormones, and seaweed gel, they got the plants to sprout and then raised them in soil in greenhouses.
Not long after it cracked the code, Burr’s lab hit financial difficulties. Heinricher had no experience running a tissue culture operation, but she wasn’t prepared to quit. So she bought the lab. “It was a scary leap,” she says. “I went from 5 employees to 55 [including Burr]. I didn’t sleep much. Changing hats overnight was a lesson in boot camp management. Sometimes I wonder how I got here.”
Today Heinricher heads up a profitable multimillion-dollar company, working on species from all over the world and selling them to wholesalers. “If you want to farm bamboo, it’s hard to do without the plantlets, and that’s what we have,” she says.
Her challenge now is to ramp up production to meet demand. That costs money. Heinricher is looking at ways to bring in investors.
“We are at the epicenter of an amazing moment,” she says. “I spend a lot of time deciding where to put my focus: Supporting manufacturers of bamboo products? Selling plants to gardeners? Breeding more varieties? Educating farmers about the economic and environmental value of bamboo forests? Or persuading legislators to line their highways with bamboo for carbon mitigation?”
Now that Heinricher can grow millions of plants, all of that-and more-is possible.
Getting Ahead with Jackie Heinricher
What is the smartest thing you’ve done while running the company?
There was so much opposition to planting bamboo. My neighbors complained about my own garden! People thought I’d gone off some deep end professionally. I’ve faced lots of naysayers every step of the way. My first loan—you can imagine what the bank thought. First there was a moment of shock, and then laughter! Deep down I wonder if it was because I am five-two and wear jeans. I’m an unlikely CEO of a very unlikely company.
Why did you succeed where others had failed?
Recognizing that the plant wouldn’t be produced any other way [unless we did it ourselves] was an important insight.
Who helped you the most?
My husband, Guy. When I mentioned the opportunity to buy the lab, he had a plan the next day for how it could work. Having someone say, Here is how the road is paved—that was just wonderful. “No guts, no glory” is what Guy says even when I’m having a fit about something. He never lets me doubt myself.
What’s your biggest weakness?
Guy thinks I should be more concerned about the bottom line than about saving the world. I have to be reminded to focus on the things that keep the lights on.
Where would you most like to see bamboo growing?
There’s a pilot project in the Mississippi Delta, an economically depressed region. They could plant moso, the 100-foot-tall bamboo used to produce textiles and flooring. I’ve met with an economic development group, landowners, and investors. That project really arouses my compassion.
What do you grow in your home garden?
Our garden is really a park, with about 160 species of bamboo mixed with perennials and trees and all kinds of wonderful plants. I’m very proud that I’m sequestering carbon dioxide-enough to offset our carbon footprints for a lifetime.
– Article by Margeret Heffernan
Reference Link : http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/healing-the-planet-with-earthfriendly-bamboo-products/article104649.html
Courtesy : Reader’s Digest
Japan aims its home fuel cells at Europe
Following the success of a half-price subsidy for CO2-busting fuel-cell heat and energy generators for homes, Japan is now poised to ship its attention to supplying the UK and Germany with this hi-tech next-generation energy source.
With over 5,000 fuel cells providing heat and energy for conventional homes up and down Japan, the BBC has learnt that companies such as electronics giant Panasonic are in talks with EU governments about the possibility of bringing these proven energy and carbon-saving devices to market in Europe and elsewhere.
Panasonic has described the interest in its commercial fuel-cell project from the German, Korean and UK governments as “intense”, and is confident that Japan, as the first to start commercial sales for homes last year, will be the forerunner in bringing the technology into common use.
Fuel cells – a technology that has been around for more than 100 years – convert fuels such as hydrogen and natural gas into electricity through an electrochemical reaction. The resultant heat generated also warms buildings in gas-boiler-sized boxes known as cogeneration fuel cells.
The idea is to generate all of the heating and hot water and the majority of the electricity needed by a typical UK home, without the need to be connected to the energy wasteful national grid.
Such efficient use of gas supplies can save the consumer around 25% of total energy costs, and reduce each home’s CO2 emissions by up to 2.5 tonnes per annum, according to their makers.
They also claim customers can earn back the system’s relatively high cost, running at present into thousands of pounds, within a few years through utility bill savings.
Cost issue
Panasonic and Toshiba, another manufacturer of home-use fuel cells in Japan, sell their cogeneration fuel cells through energy companies such as Tokyo Gas for around 3.1 to 2.2 million yen. Panasonic claims around 3,000 customers so far, including the Japanese PM’s office.
Half that price is met by the government on each purchase, while other incentives bring the real price down for consumers to about 1 million yen (£7,300).
“If the price falls again still, its popularity will gain momentum,” general manager of Panasonic’s fuel cell project, Mr Yasumasa Kurosaki, told the BBC. He added that the company aimed at fixing the per-unit price at around 500,000 yen, and get it even lower in the near future.
With economies of scale, Panasonic says, such devices could be competitively priced at around a couple of thousand of pounds by 2013.
“With over 40,000 hours running time already logged, we have proven the safety, reliability and CO2 savings of our devices in the real world while sales are improving gradually. We expect next year’s sales to be up 20-30% on the last fiscal year,” he said.
The UK government has estimated that microgeneration products, such as fuel-cell combined-heat-and-power (CHP) units, have the potential to supply over one-third of the country’s total electricity needs and help meet its environmental obligations.
However, high capital costs are still a major barrier to widespread adoption of fuel-cell technology.
Fuel-cell makers have yet to turn a profit despite the massive investments in Japan and elsewhere around the world.
But some are optimistic the gas-burning-without-combustion systems could be the answer to soaring fuel costs and lowering carbon emissions.
Pay-back time
“Once fuel cells hit the US$5,000 (£3,300) mark, which we imagine will happen in the next 2 years, these units will become as compelling to home owners as energy-saving water-heaters and double-glazing,” Tokyo- based entrepreneur and business analyst Terrie Lloyd told the BBC.
“It will be hard to ignore a product that might save US$2,500 or more a year on energy bills.”
The UK government meanwhile recently announced further support for the adoption of the technology with a money-back feed-in-tariff (FIT) for all fuel-cell owners that starts this April.
Under the FIT, any household installing a fuel cell will receive a generation payment of 10p/kWh for all electricity generated over a 10-year period, plus an additional export payment of 3p/kWh for any electricity that is not consumed in the home and is fed back into the grid.
Importantly, households will still retain the efficiency savings on their energy bills, providing an incentive to consume any electricity generated on-site, in preference to exporting to the grid.
“On average, a home fuel user can expect about £360-a-year cash-back in addition to the energy bill savings from consuming the electricity generated on-site,” according to the UK’s leading fuel-cell maker, Ceres Power.
The company plans to go into mass production after completing field studies this year. Initial prices for its generators are not yet available but they are unlikely to match Japanese competiveness, says Mr Lloyd, as Japan has achieved a big start with widespread commercialization last year.
Export possibilities
Despite high prices, some think the market is ready to explode. Tokyo-based research firm Fuji-Keizai Group has estimated Japan’s market for fuel cells will expand nearly 100-fold from fiscal 2009 to 1.61 trillion yen in fiscal 2025 owing to uptake of the technology for housing and vehicles.
Fuel-cell systems for housing, says its report, will serve as a driving force for the market until 2018 when fuel-celled cars are expected to take over demand.
Panasonic is bullish about possible exports of Japanese know-how to the UK and Germany where gas is generally cheaper than electricity per kW and solar cells offer a poor return on investment.
Mr Kurosaki said he was confident Panasonic could reduce costs, increase efficiency and extend the life of its units which now have a lifespan of 10 years to make an attractive package to overseas buyers and governments looking to cut CO2 emissions quickly.
With gas fuel for Japan’s fuel cells more costly per kW than electricity in Japan, some analysts see Japan’s nascent fuel-cell industry reaping benefits abroad.
And with such high prices for gas in energy-poor Japan, take up of the new technology may well fizzle out along with the government subsidies that support the current market. Cutting capital costs and boosting sales to compete abroad seems the only likelihood of success for the Japanese makers if they are to scale up and be competitive without subsidies.
Reference Link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8563928.stm
Courtesy
BBC News
Online in Brazil's shanty towns
The internet has created many new opportunities for people to get richer around the world.
But are the benefits of access to the net filtering down to the very poorest in society?
A shanty town in Brazil is a good place to find out.
Babilonia is a favela, a slum district, of about 80,000 inhabitants, most of them very poor.
It’s located in Brazil’s second city Rio de Janeiro, close to the world famous Copacabana beach.
Police control
The favela looks almost picturesque, with shacks lining the side of a hill amid lush tropical vegetation.
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 A season of reports exploring the extraordinary power of the internet, including: Digital giants – top thinkers in the business on the future of the web
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But until recently this was a dangerous place to live.
It was run by drug dealers. Violence was rife.
Then, a few months ago, the police moved in and retook control.
Despite this uncertain environment, some people living in the favela make quite sophisticated use of the internet.
Web users in Babilonia, unlike many other poor communities around the world, do not face technical difficulties in accessing the net.
The favela is near the heart of the major city. Communication links are good.
Very few people in the favela are wealthy enough to have a connected computer at home.
Instead, they go online at internet cafes, known as Lan houses.
There are several Lan houses in easy reach.
Internet’s role
The web ‘could really raise awareness of my services,’ says Morelio
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The first place I stopped at was a creche run by a charity.
It looks after the children of families living in the favela while their parents are at work.
In many families both parents are away from home most of the day, working long hours to make ends meet.
The creche provides the kids with a place to go.
The internet plays a crucial role in raising the money it needs to survive.
“We raise 60% of our funds by sending out email appeals,” explains Antonia Nascimento, the creche organiser.
She relies on donations from people living outside the favela and corporate sponsors to pay the staff and maintain the building.
“If you’re going to call a director from a big company, you won’t get him on the phone so you just drop him an e-mail so whenever he has time he can look at our request.
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 It tends to be middle class people who make first use of the internet because they have more knowledge of how to make use of computers  Kathi Kitner, anthropologist
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“Maybe we could run the creche without the internet but it would be very hard.”
The creche also uses the web to keep in touch with parents.
At a bar in the favela I met a tough looking man who runs a motorcycle repair business.
Twenty-eight-year-old Morelio says he plans to advertise via the internet to drum up more customers.
“There’s a lot of competition, the internet could really raise awareness of my services.”
He claims that much of his business comes through word of mouth recommendations from satisfied customers.
“If I could advertise these recommendations on the internet it would really help me get more business,” he says.
Technology’s appeal
The message of these two small examples is that when given the chance people in poor communities use the internet to gain economic advantage in much the same way as anyone else.
Babilonia is one of many favelas in Brazil targeted for help by an aid charity CDI, Centre for Digital Inclusion, which works with poor communities to increase their access to technology.
Given a chance people in poorer communities use the internet in much the same way as anyone else
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“Drug dealers are the role models because they have power, women and money. What we need is to create alternatives,” says CDI director Rodrigo Baggio.
He says children in favelas typically see the internet and technology as “cool” and a passport to a better life and improved job prospects.
Charities and governments are involved in internet inclusion projects intended to increase poor and marginalised communities’ access to the net in many parts of the world.
Cultural issues
But Kathi Kitner, who works an anthropologist for the computer chipmaker Intel, says it’s not enough simply to provide the technology.
To work, digital inclusion projects must come with measures to support poor people’s efforts to create income from using the internet.
She says there needs to be an awareness of cultural sensitivities.
For example, in India, she says, rural caste systems are still strong so it’s important to know where connected computers will be located as there are places that poor lower caste groups are not allowed to enter.
She also cites the example of an internet access project in northern Brazil that may have exacerbated local inequalities.
“It tends to be middle class people who make first use of the internet, because they have more knowledge of how to make use of computers.”
“That’s not a bad thing, but it’s often wrong to assume that knowledge will trickle down to the poorest.”
Potentially, the internet is a powerful tool for people at the bottom of society to improve their fortunes but making it work for them is far from easy.
Reference Link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8565164.stm
Courtesy
BBC News
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