BluGre to bring Davao’s durian coffee to the world

By: Germelina Lacorte
Inquirer Mindanao

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Photo by Germelina Lacorte, Inquirer Mindanao

The coffee shop that brought the coffee lifestyle to Davao more than a decade ago is now eyeing to bring Davao City to the world.

BluGre Café, whose name has become synonymous with Davao City for concocting the coffee blend mixed with the pulp of Davao’s icon fruit durian, is finally setting its eyes not only on major cities in the country but also in major cities in Asia, Canada and the US.

“Twenty for 2012,” says BluGre coffee owner Gatchie Gatchalian, referring to the 20 stores they are set to open for the year 2012.

Gatchalian says they have inked an agreement with a number of partners to open branches, targeting durian-eating countries like Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand; and cities with large concentration of Filipinos, including Las Vegas in the US, Toronto in Canada and Adelaide, Australia.

“We are going to make our presence felt in these places because these are cities and countries where our partners are based,” he says.

He remembers how he, himself, a coffee lover, and wife Larchie, first opened its Davao branch in 1998 as a spinoff of the fashion brand they are selling. But even from the beginning, Gatchalian says he already recognized the need to make his brand stand out by making a difference in the highly-competitive market.

“Even before we opened, I already made sure, that we should have something different to offer, something that really speaks about Davao,” he says. “That’s how we started experimenting with durian coffee.”

Gatchie says not all people come to like the durian fruit the first time they taste it, but coffee tends to drown out its pungent taste and masks its strong and disagreeable smell, that’s why the durian coffee could be a good introduction to the actual fruit.

“Offering them durian coffee could be the first step in introducing the fruit to non-durian eaters,” says Gatchie, who grew up in Manila and did not take to the fruit easily the first time he tasted it.

OWNER Gatchie Gatchalian. Photo by Germelina Lacorte, Inquirer Mindanao

“Like I did, not all people would come to like the fruit immediately,” he says. “But if you do it in the coffee, the coffee covers its strong and disagreeable smell, that’s the first step,” he says, “Soon afterwards, they can eat the durian fruit, itself.”

When BluGre opened its first branch at the LandCo building in 1998, the coffee culture has not yet swept Davao. But when young urban professionals and students discovered the pleasure of hanging around the cozy, well-designed interiors, having long intimate conversations or simply relaxing in its quiet ambiance, word got around, giving birth to the coffee lifestyle of the Davaoeños. This triggered the sprouting of more coffee shops all over Davao, so that, in one of the press briefing in the late 90s, night bars had complained of thinning crowds as more people hang around cafes at night.

BluGre has not only become popular among the locales but also among travelers and visitors.

“When you’re from Manila, you will likely look for something different when you      arrive in Davao, something you have not tasted before, and that’s why they continue to come to BluGre,” he says.

He admits, too, that sales was temporarily affected by the coming in of Starbucks in Davao in May last year but sales perked up again as visitors continue to search for the coffee shop that “truly reflects” the tastes of Davao.

Aside from the durian coffee, BluGre also offers the usual fare of latte and mocha; and a number of bestselling cakes and pastries. BluGre sources most of its Philippine coffee beans from the Mountain Province; so, to ensure product quality in all of the BluGre outlets, they have organized a quality control team to maintain and ensure the consistency of their product, Gatchie says.

“That we brought the coffee culture to Davao, that is our claim to fame, so the whole country wrote about it. For a while BluGre has become Davaoeños’ official drink,” he says.

He considers his brand positioning so successful that even their durian coffee was being copied by newcomers. “But what could be a greater flattery?” he asks.

“In Davao, they say there are already 280 coffee shops, matira ang matibay (only the fittest will survive),” Gatchie say.

“But we alone can claim to have started the coffee culture in Davao since 1998 and we’ll make sure we will continue that,” he says. “We will continue to capitalize on durian coffee, targeting durian eating countries abroad, which include Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand.”

“We will also be targeting Davaoeños abroad,” he says.

Gatchie says he is thankful that Davao has been treating BluGre as their own brand but they had to set their eyes beyond the country if they build on what they have done.

“We plan to go where there is a concentration of Filipinos,” he says. “Our slogan is bring Davao to the world.”

Pulling Bicol up from poverty with coco fiber ropes

The story of Dr. Justino Arboleda

By: Ralph Fajardo
Philippine Daily Inquirer

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DR. ARBOLEDA: He pulled Bicol up with coco fiber rope.

In the early 90s, when the then dean of Bicol University’s College of Agriculture, Dr. Justino Arboleda, first heard of a report naming Bicol as the second poorest province in the Philippines, he was incredulous. “I could not believe it! How could Bicol be the second poorest province?” he asked. “We are so rich in coconut trees, the tree of life itself.”

He then continued, “So we conducted our own investigation in the university and to our dismay, we found that the report was correct.” Thus started Dr. Arboleda’s crusade to discover what had caused Bicol’s poverty and, more importantly, how to help alleviate it.

The quest eventually led him to leave his comfortable spot in the academe. He went straight to where these poor people were—the coconut farmers—to be able to give them an alternative means of livelihood by starting his own coconut husk processing company, now known as Coco Technologies Corporation (Cocotech).

“In school, we always hear that the coconut tree is the tree of life, that every part of the tree is useful,” he explains. “But in real life, we do not use every part of the tree. The coconut husk, for instance, is thrown away more than 99 percent of the time. It is considered farm waste—but when you think about it, there are actually so many things you could do with the coconut husk!”

As an agricultural engineering graduate from the Tokyo University, with a master’s and a doctorate degree to boot, Dr. Arboleda certainly knew what he was talking about. All the know-how, he already had. There was just one crucial thing that kept him from turning coco fiber (from coconut husk) into a profitable business venture: funding.

“At that time, nobody believed you could make money from coco fiber,” he says. “Wherever we went, they laughed at us. One banker that we tried to borrow from even scolded me. He says, ‘You in the academe are so full of researches, but you are unwilling to invest your own money into them.’”

With this challenge thrown in his face, Dr. Arboleda decided to do exactly what that banker said he would not do. He took his family’s savings, borrowed what he could from his siblings, and with the P250,000 that he was able to pool, plus the 5-by-10-meter piece of land his in-laws lent him, he started his tiny coco husk processing factory.

Incidentally, for him to be able to focus on the business, Dr. Arboleda also resigned from his dean position in Bicol University. “I knew I would need to be away most of the time to market our products, and I did not want people to say that I continued to receive a salary even when I was not present at the university.”

With his safety net of a fixed income gone, Dr. Arboleda took on consultancy work to support his family’s needs as his business strove to get off the ground. This consultancy sent him to overseas conferences. When it sent him to Germany less than a year after the business started, he took advantage of the opportunity to market his coco fiber products.

He educated his audience on coco fiber’s superior ability to absorb moisture, pressure, sound, and odors. He explained that coco fiber has natural antifungal and antibacterial properties. It is resistant to insects and mold. It could be used to insulate buildings from heat, cold, and sound. Coco fiber doormats ensured that all dirt and water from the streets stayed outside the shiny buildings’ doors. Coco fiber was good for car seat cushions, cat scratching poles, planting materials, even fertilizer. To top it all off, it was affordable, durable, and completely biodegradable.

INSTALLING coconut fiber at Estero De Paco

The Europeans knew a good thing when they saw it. Suddenly, Dr. Arboleda had a huge export market. When he came home, he had to ask his in-laws if he could expand his factory to cover the whole farm. They agreed on a lease price, and the factory grew.

For several years after that, Dr. Arboleda was able to give livelihood to around a thousand households in Bicol. The people who spun his coco fiber ropes, which formed the base of many of his products, earned more money than they ever earned from just farming. Even the children were allowed to help, but only under Dr. Arboleda’s condition that they stayed in school. If the kids dropped out of school, the family was removed from the list of contractors. The families, of course, kept their kids in school. It all worked as it was supposed to.

Then disaster struck. One day, while visitors were at the factory, somebody accidentally dropped a lighted cigarette on a pile of coconut husks. “We are normally very strict against smoking near the factory, but visitors can be a bit hard to monitor,” Dr. Arboleda said. A raging fire resulted, and just like that, the factory was burned to the ground. Fortunately, they were insured, but the damages were not fully covered. The company had to shoulder the rest.

They were able to rebuild. But as luck would have it, just as they were starting to get on their feet again, that once-in-a-lifetime typhoon Reming struck. It was a typhoon Bicol would never forget, for the whole province was devastated.

As for Cocotech, their newly rebuilt factory was flattened. To make matters even worse, the coconut trees in the province were all felled, and there were no coconuts that could be sourced from Bicol for two whole years.

“At that time, I really wanted to give up,” Dr. Arboleda recalls. “But I could not abandon my employees.” And so little by little, they started again. For a time, they outsourced their raw materials from other provinces. It took six years for them to again rebuild their factory—but this time, they made sure the structure was typhoon-proof.

Recently, Dr. Arboleda was able to present his products and his work to President Noynoy Aquino. He showed the president how his erosion-controlling coco nets would allow the government to create longer-lasting ripraps at a fraction of the cost they would incur if they used concrete instead.

The coco nets helped plants grow on the riprap, their roots held the soil tightly, and they prevented landslide not only because the plant roots took in the water but also because the coco fiber nets were highly absorbent.

In fact, Dr. Arboleda’s technology had already been used in earlier years to prevent landslide in the Tagaytay Highlands. His coco nets were also used in the ripraps along the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expresway (SCTEx). Now, under President Aquino’s directive, they will be used in the Tarlac-Pangasinan-La Union Expressway (TPLEx).

With a project of this magnitude, Dr. Arboleda once again faced his biggest headache: funding. “Our clients take 60 to 90 days to pay us,” he explains, “but our workers need to be paid on the spot.”

Fortunately, this time, Dr. Arboleda found an ally. Steering away from all the institutions that had rejected him in the past, he says, “We presented our case to Plantersbank, and they listened. They were very supportive, and they loaned us the money we needed to pay our workers so that this project could be done.

“I only wish I had met them earlier,” he laughs.

Today, Coco Technologies Corporation has a 7,000 square meter factory in Bicol, plus a separate warehouse in Quezon City. They are exporting products to Europe, Japan, and Canada. They are giving livelihood to around 2,000 households in Bicol.

In addition, they are offering free training to everyone who wants to follow in their footsteps.

“The market out there is huge, there’s plenty for all,” says the Bicolano hero. Indeed, there is life in the coconut tree. But it took one Dr. Arboleda to bring that life to Bicol’s poor.

An Institute For Organic Farmers

By ZAC B. SARIAN

MANILA, Philippines — The ongoing trend is production of healthy foods, which means naturally-farmed food products that are not sprayed with chemical pesticides or meat products that are laced with antibiotics.

The problem is that there are no well established institutions where interested individuals can learn the fine points of organic agriculture. Most of the seminars are conducted by individuals who have been practicing the techniques of organic agriculture. The curriculum is not included in formal institutions of learning such as the colleges of agriculture and state universities.

Of course, the pioneering individuals are doing good service to the movement. Naturally, if the training is well organized, it could become a healthy partnership of the government and private sector.

Probably that was what was in the mind of Dr. Francisco de la Pena Jr. when he decided to put up about a couple of years ago his Natural Farming Institute in Panabo City. After all, he is the founder of two colleges in Davao del Norte, one in Tagum and the other in Panabo.

So far, he has established showcases of naturally farmed pigs, chickens, goat, vegetables, banana, papaya and even bangus. He has formulated an organic fish feed (he is a fisheries expert with a PhD degree), and has vermiculture bins for the production of organic fertilizer. The institute also has a fermentation house where fermented juices of fruits and plant materials are processed for application in organic farming.

The first batch of trainees came from Davao City consisting mostly of barangay officials. The strategy is to train the higher ups in the community so they can influence their constituents to adopt organic farming techniques more effectively.

One of the most active barangay captains is Jimmy Poliquit of Davao City who has put up his own projects of raising organic pigs and chickens. He is now readying a program whereby the barangay funds will be used to support the dispersal of chickens and pigs among interested barangay members. He stressed, however, that before any recipient is given his pigs or chickens, he will have to undergo training.

Trainees at the Farming Institute of Dr. de la Peña also come from other provinces. For instance, the officials and council members of Maribojoc, Bohol, including Mayor Leoncio Evasco, have undergone training in Panabo
.