Jasberry

My name is Peetachai (Neil) Dejkraisak and I’m from Thailand. I started a social enterprise in 2011 with a mission to help take small-scale farmers out of poverty by providing innovative delicious & healthy organic products to global consumers. The last 9 years of my life has been dedicated to this vision. The company (Jasberry and Siam Organic– www.jasberry.net) generates transformative social impact while maintaining financial sustainability, which is a business model I wanted to prove to be successful so we can inspire change-makers around the world that want to make a difference.

Starting with just 25 farmers’ households in 2011, we are now working with over 2,500 small-scale farmers households in the impoverished Northeastern Thailand, impacting more than 12,500 lives, increasing their income from just $0.40/day to $5.80/day, an increase of 14 times. My current role as a CEO is to scale up our impact across the world.

Imagine if there was a crop that could transform the health of consumers worldwide, and at the same time take millions of farmers out of poverty. Imagine if there was a staple food that wasn't only delicious, but nutritious as well. Jasberry® rice is a new variety of rice that has been developed through natural cross-breeding for over 12 years. Non-GMO & Dark purple in color, Jasberry rice has over 40 times higher antioxidants than brown rice and 4 times higher antioxidants than quinoa. It is soft, and delicious despite being 100% whole grain. It has a potential to be “the World’s First Staple Superfood” which allows consumers to have a healthy & affordable food every day while supporting farmers out of poverty.

Using this superfood rice, we work with over 2,500 small-scale farmers’ families (12,500 people), increasing their income from just $0.40/day to $5.80/day, an increase of 14 times.

Despite Thailand being the world’s no. 1 rice exporter, our rice farmers are among the poorest in the world, earning just $0.40/day, 6 times below the poverty line. There are 17 million farmers in Thailand alone, that is 25% of the population. Globally there are estimated 500 million smallholder farmers households, amounting to upwards of two billion people, most of which live on less than $2/day. A combination of lack of knowledge, technology, systematic support and unstable market contribute to their poverty which continues to get worse and worse despite various government and NGO solutions. That is why we believe a market-driven solution is the most sustainable and scalable solution to this problem.

Additionally, over 1/3 of the world or 3.5 billion people, rely on rice as a staple food. While rice provides basic energy for people, it's also one of the biggest causes of diabetes, with high glycemic index and close to zero nutritional value. This has caused a multiple of health issues globally.

This is the puzzle that we have been to able to successfully solve on a small-medium scale and we are now at a tipping point of scaling our impact across the globe.

Jasberry® rice is a new variety of rice that has been developed through natural cross-breeding for over 12 years. Non-GMO & Dark purple in color, Jasberry rice has over 40 times higher antioxidants* than brown rice, 7 times higher antioxidants than kale and 4 times higher antioxidants than quinoa. It is also soft, and delicious despite being 100% whole grain. It is also easy to cook and extremely versatile for any type of dishes. In short, it has a potential to be “the World’s First Staple Superfood” which allows consumers to have a healthy, delicious & affordable food everyday while supporting farmers out of poverty.

Using this superfood rice, we work to eliminate farmer poverty by partnering with over 2,500 small-scale Thai farmers’ families (12,500 people). We work throughout the entire value chain from providing farmers with Jasberry rice seeds, to crop planning, to selecting what fertilizer would give them maximum yield, to training them on how to grow it organically, to micro-financing them. As a result, the farmers have seen over 40% increase in yields, 25% reduction in costs and they have been able to increase their income from just $0.40/day to $5.80/day, an increase of over 14 times.

We serve small-scale farmers in the impoverished Northeastern Thailand where most of our country’s 17 million rice farmers reside. I went to this region in 2011 when I first started this project and spent the first 2 years living and working in a farmer’s house to understand their needs and how we could design the social business model to address those needs without disrupting their lives. At each step of our progress over the past 9 years, the farmers have had a direct input because we exist to serve them. To better understand our impact let me share a story with you.

Ms. Ma is a Jasberry rice farmer from Yasothon province in northeastern Thailand. Just 3 years ago she had over $10,000 of debt and used chemicals on her 6 acres of land. Now she's able to pay off all her debt and increase her landholding to 13.5 acres of land. Most importantly her 3 children that were working in a factory near Bangkok are now back on the farm working with her, because it is now economically sustainable for them to do so. This is the kind of impact we envisioned when we started Jasberry in 2011.  

As Thailand developed over the past 10 years, the northeastern part of the country, where the farmers live, has been largely ignored. In fact, the farmers’ debts have tripled over the past 10 years. In Thailand there is a saying that rice is a political crop, meaning that it’s in the politicians’ best interest to keep the farmers under poverty so they will get more votes by coming up with new short-term policies to help them. In particular, the female farmers have not had any opportunities in life and that’s why we empower female as the leaders of the cooperatives.

In 2011, all the headlines in Thai newspaper was about the government’s rice pledging scheme. The government was offering to purchase the rice at a higher-than-market price, effectively destroying the free market mechanism. What’s more, because the government purchased the rice from a rice mill, the money went to the rice mill and the middlemen instead of the individual farmer. As a final year MBA student with a dream to start a social enterprise, I started to look into this problem deeper. At that point I thought the market-driven solution to poverty would be the sustainable and scalable option and the key to this was innovation. I approached an award-winning rice scientist to see if there was an innovation that could help rice farmers. As it turned out, the scientist developed this new variety of delicious & healthy superfood rice and wanted to help the farmers. So I told him that I would start a social enterprise to make his dream come true. The next 2 years was me living and working with farmers on the ground gaining their trust so they would grow this rice! My co-founder who was my MBA classmate is now the CMO of the company.

I had a hero growing up, his name was Seub Nakhasathien. He’s a Thai gentlemen who was a conservationist and environmental activist. After graduating from England on a national scholarship, he came back home to work in forest conservation. His work threatened many corrupted businesses that were profiting from illegal logging. As a result they killed one of his staff and threatened to kill his family. One night he wrote a letter and shot himself afterwards, at the age of 40. His death and the letter he wrote started the largest environmental movement in Thai history, and the forest he was protecting, Huai Kha Khaeng Sanctuary, is now the largest wildlife sanctuary in Thailand, the largest seasonal tropical forest in Southeast Asia and a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Seub inspired me to make a difference to my country and my people. Given that 1 in 4 Thai person (and over 2 billion people around the world) is a farmer, it is where I felt I could make the biggest impact. I also want to prove to people that we can use business as a tool to change the world and be an inspiration to new generations of social entrepreneurs.

I graduated with double degrees in Environmental Engineering and Economics (later on with an MBA) from University of Melbourne which gave me the project management skills required to manage an agricultural supply chain as well as a business understanding to design a sustainable business model to deliver both social and financial impacts. However, there are more significant factors that I believe made me uniquely-positioned to deliver this project. 

I grew up in Thailand and moved to Australia at the age of 14. I lived on a farm out in the country with an Australian family and took care of their plants and animals. That experience gave me the understanding of nature and the amazing connectivity that exists in the ecosystem. 

Being the only Asian kid in a Western school meant that I was bullied a lot and had to overcome challenging circumstances as a young boy without my parents to support me. I learnt to be resilient but more importantly I learnt the value of empathy. I learnt later on that many kids that were bullying me came from very tough upbringings. This gave me the ability to understand and connect with people from all walks of life which became critical in gaining the farmers trust. I remember many farmers that questioned my motive when I first started 9 years ago. After 2 years of hard-work on the field with them and connecting with them on a human level, I was able to lead their communities as an ‘outsider.’

When we first started the project in 2011, we didn’t realize there was an inherent disease associated with Jasberry rice. So when the first 25 farmers started growing it, the rice had Bakanae Disease which caused most of the rice to die. Despite this setback we worked closely with the farmers’ specialist rice breeders to use different methods to prevent this problem such as submerging rice seeds in a special type of bacteria. This learning process took 2 years (this is 2 crop season since the farmer can only grow rice once per year) and it required a lot of communication between all parties. Because I had lived and worked with the farmers prior to this, a certain level of trust has been developed and as a result they continued to believe in this project despite this obstacle. On top of this our processing partner (rice mill) at the time didn’t pay the farmers correctly despite us advancing a large amount of money as a deposit. We had to make the tough decision of canceling such partnership as they didn’t put farmers first. Now we use the farmers’ cooperative rice mill which employ many local female farmers in the community.

In 2016 our company was growing fast, we were scaling up our work with the farmers rapidly with profound impact and we were financially sustainable. We were celebrated in the national media as a success story of a business doing good. From the outside everything looked rosy. However, I felt that within the team, our culture wasn’t right. We had hired a number of high-performing people but they didn’t care about our cause. So at the end of 2016 I made the tough decision of letting go of the entire team of 14 people and restarting our company. The idea was that if we weren’t living our purpose each and every day what were we doing with our lives, given all the sacrifices we have made up to that point. Since then we have instilled a value-based culture designed to delivering the greatest impact possible for the farmers and consumers. Each and every one of our team member right now lives and breathes our purpose every day and our work is more impactful than ever. It is important for me that when I look at each person in my team I see inspiration and hope for a better world.

Jasberry rice is a new variety of rice that has been developed through natural cross-breeding for over 12 years so it’s completely new to the world. Non-GMO, organic & Dark purple in color, it has an incredible amount of antioxidants, over 133 times higher antioxidants than white rice and 40 times higher antioxidants than brown rice.

Jasberry rice was recently recognized by the Food and Beverage award (FABI) in the US. The award honors the year's most delicious, unique, and exciting food product that will shape the future of food - https://www.nationalrestaurant... 

Over 1/3 of the world or 3.5 billion people, rely on rice as a staple food. While rice provides basic energy for people, it's also one of the biggest causes of diabetes, with high glycemic index and close to zero nutritional value. Jasberry rice provides far superior nutrition and also has a glycemic index of around 58-60 which makes it the lowest glycemic-index-rice apart from Basmati rice. It is transformative as it’s the world’s first staple superfood, a superfood rice that is affordable for the mass.

Our value proposition extends far beyond the consumers. We have a system of entire value chain management of Jasberry rice, such as seed breeding and organic farm training, which allows farmers to achieve over 40% increase in yields, 25% reduction in costs and they have been able to increase their income from just $0.40/day to $5.80/day. Currently we are impacting over 12,500 growers with a potential to scale and impact farmers globally.

Currently we are serving 2,500 farmers’ families, impacting 12,500 lives. The next year we plan to grow the farmers base from 2,500 families to 4,000 families, impacting 20,000 lives, and within the next five years grow to 20,000 families, impacting over 100,000 lives and helping them out of poverty in a sustainable manner. On the distribution side, we are already working with leading retailers in more than 10 countries around the world to serve millions of consumers but we are penetrating new channels such as schools, hospitals, restaurants and airlines. We want to make sure Jasberry rice is easily accessible and affordable for the global consumers in order for them to transform their health.

Our goal is to be the first social enterprise in the world that is listed on the stock market. We want to prove to the world that it is possible to have a company with social mission at the core that is financially sustainable. We want to inspire a new generation of social entrepreneurs to use their entrepreneurial skills to create businesses that make the world better, businesses with social and environmental impact goals at the heart. We want our business model to be replicated across the world to help millions of small-scale farmers get out of poverty while transforming the health of people around the world with the ‘World’s first staple superfood.’ We want to create a new way of doing business and make it a ‘normal’ way of doing business over the next 5 years. We will also partner with some of the world’s biggest food companies and change the way they do their businesses to create sustainable change on a global scale.

There are 2 huge barriers for us to accomplish our goals in the next year and in the next 5 years. First is financing. Being based in Thailand, we have zero access to financing from financial institutions and it’s practically impossible for us to scale to the level we want to reach and this is out of our control. With this prize money, we could truly scale internationally and impact millions of lives and change the way ‘normal’ business is done forever. On top of this, we will be exhibiting our project at Expo 2020 Dubai (now moved to 2021) and we want to showcase our project and be a source of inspiration for the entire world. We were selected as 1 of 70 organizations out of 2,300 applications from 136 countries and the only representative from Thailand.

The second barrier is international marketing/branding. With extremely limited resources it’s extremely difficult for us to tell our story to the global consumers. We need a lot of help in terms of marketing and branding as we lack the expertise and resources within our team to do so, especially as we are expanding into so many countries and competing against gigantic food conglomerates.

Please refer to the Partnership Opportunities section, where we discuss about how The Elevate Prize program can help.

We partner with Kiva to offer microfinancing solutions to farmers in order to diversify their risks. As they don’t have irrigation, they can only grow rice once a year and relies heavily on natural rainfall. However, drought and flooding are still a possible risk. We offer microfinancing for farmers to purchase cows. This allows farmers to not only reduce their farming cost (making organic fertilizer from cow manure) but they can sell the cow at a significant profit. To give an idea, a cow costs around $1,000 and just after raising it for 12 months the farmer can sell the cow for around $1,333, a profit of 30% per year. We are one of the few official field partners with Kiva in Thailand.

We also partner with the Unreasonable Group, an organization and private global network dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs positioned to bend history in the right direction. This involves supporting other social entrepreneurs globally through partnerships in order to maximize the impact.

We have a for-profit social enterprise and a non-profit foundation that work on the same mission, lifting small-scale farmers out of poverty. We provide the following options for the farmers:  

- 100% pure organic Jasberry rice seeds

- Organic fertilisers 

- Microfinancing

- Training on farming technique to  achieve higher yield and lower cost 

- Diseases & water management 

- Internal control system to comply with  third-party organic certification body  under USDA, EU organic standards &  traceability

- Guaranteed purchase price of approximately 200% of the price of Jasmine rice  

Our business model has been designed based on me spending the first 2 years of the business living and working in the field with the farmer in order to better understand their needs. Most of these ideas come from them, and are implemented in a way that would be sustainable and scalable going forward. 

On the revenue side we currently sell our organic products mostly B2B in 9 countries, Thailand, US, Germany, Austria, New Zealand, UAE, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong

It was our intent from the beginning to make our company a for-profit social enterprise. As a result, it took us 2 years to break even. And within 2 years of going to market domestically in Thailand we were able to generate over $500,000 of revenue. We continue to reinvest 100% of our profit to grow our impact. Even though we have proven our business model to be financially sustainable, for us to scale our solution globally we need outside financing help, especially to invest in food technology and international market expansion. We started to lose money as we invested in expanding overseas and realized we need financing and marketing help. That is why the Elevate Prize directly addresses the areas we lack in order to scale our impact globally. With this help, our company will be truly financial sustainable in the long term.  

Furthermore, we have been audited for Social Impact Assessment (SIA) by IIX Foundation (formerly known as Shujog) and they found that our Social Return on Investment (SROI) is 4.3 times which means that for every dollar we invest into the company it’s generating 4.3 dollars for the farmers. This means that as our company grows, the social impact grows with us exponentially.

Right now we are generating around $400,000-500,000/year from sales of organic products. Our business is mostly B2B.  

We have been supported by Expo Live as a part of Expo 2020 Dubai World Expo in year 2019. We were selected as 1 of 70 social and environmental-focused organizations out of 2,300 applications from 136 countries around the world and the only representative from Thailand. They gave us $100,000 in grants.  

We also won an Entrepreneurship award from ex-president Barack Obama at Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2016, a grant in the amount of $30,000.

Farmer IT application implementation and program adjustment $50,000

Farmers training and other related-programs $80,000

Product development $20,000

Digital Marketing and branding activities $60,000

International marketing & Sales $40,000

Team building $40,000

The Elevate prize directly addresses our 2 biggest obstacles to scaling our proven impact business model, financing and international marketing/branding. 

Being based in Thailand, we have zero access to financing from financial institutions and it’s practically impossible for us to scale to the level we want to reach and this is out of our control. With this prize money, we could truly scale internationally and impact millions of lives and change the way ‘normal’ business is done forever. On top of this, we will be exhibiting our project at Expo 2020 Dubai (now moved to 2021) and we want to showcase our project and be a source of inspiration for the entire world. We were selected as 1 of 70 organizations out of 2,300 applications from 136 countries and the only representative from Thailand.

The second barrier is international marketing/branding. With extremely limited resources it’s extremely difficult for us to tell our story to the global consumers. The Elevate Prize provides us with a tailored media and marketing campaign aimed at amplifying our work around the world. We hope this will inspire transformative change in the food business industry globally. With presence in 9 countries and growing, we have built the foundation for this growth. Now we just need a boost!

Lastly, after dedicating everyday of my life for the past 9 years to this cause, Covid-19 has hit us hard financially as many of our customers shut down. This prize will make a huge difference to our current situation.

We are looking to find suitable long-term funding partners with clear social value alignment with our mission. We call this ‘social impact partners.’ We are also looking for marketing/media partners to amplify our story around the world to inspire entrepreneurs to make a difference and consumers to make more impactful choices. Additionally we are looking for mentors and board members that can help us penetrate the US market as that will make the biggest impact in terms of scale for the work that we have dedicated to for the past 9 years.

Most importantly we are looking for innovative partnerships to create values for all parties involved, and to make a transformation change globally over the next 5 years.

We are the only Thai food company to receive B-Corp certification. Apart from validating our commitment to social and environmental impact, transparency and accountability, Jasberry has been recognized as one of B Corp’s Best For The World Honoree in the category: Community, fighting every day for a better world through the way we run our business and put our community first. This puts us in the top 10% of all B Corps worldwide.

https://bcorporation.net/directory/jasberry-co-ltd 

We would like to partner with leading global B-Crop food companies such as Ben & Jerry's and Danone to use Jasberry rice as a raw ingredient in their products to deliver better health to consumers as well as impacting farmers’ lives across the world. These types of creative business partnerships will not only bring more financial sustainability and social impact into our business, but also change the way these food giants approach their sustainability goals.

As mentioned previously, we would also like to find social impact partners in the US where we feel will have a huge significance for our future growth. As we are not so aware of the ecosystem there, the Elevate Prize will help us reach those partners in a meaningful way and start a conversation to create maximum impact for the world.