Santhosh Mary’s flatware made
from areca palm spathes is flying off the shelves from her home-based unit in
Valadi
Dinner plates and bowls of
various sizes are lined up, ready for collection at the entrance of J Santhosh
Mary’s home in the village of Valadi, 18 kilometres from Tiruchirapalli.
A large number of them will be
picked up by caterers in neighbouring towns and cities; another batch will be
dispatched to clients in Germany and Canada.
The vessels are made from spathes
of the areca palm ( paaku in Tamil), and are completely
biodegradable, which has boosted their marketability in view of the recent ban
on single-use disposable plastic products in Tamil Nadu.
“When I started out in 2009, it
was very difficult to get buyers, because plastic was everywhere. Shopkeepers
would object to my pricing plates at Rs. 2, as disposable plastic ware was
always much cheaper,” says Santhosh Mary, who employs six people to run her
home-based cottage industry setup.
“The ban has created a new demand,
especially in the mass catering sector. In fact, there are days when it’s not
possible to meet everyone’s orders.”
Upgrading technology
The spathe is a sheath that
encases the flower cluster of the areca, and falls off naturally.
Santhosh Mary sources them from
agents, buying 3,000 to 5,000 pieces at a time, according to the demand. “A
spathe can be used to make around three 12-inch dinner plates. While Indian
clients are not very particular about the colour, the plates going abroad have
to be made out of white spathes. Our agents fan out across areca farms in
Thuraiyur, Thammampatti and Namakkal and beyond. Most of the spathes for
foreign orders come from Salem district,” she says.
The intrepid businesswoman, a
mother of two and a graduate in Economics with a Masters in Administration, has
come a long way from the day she attended a plate-making course organised by
the Women Entrepreneurs Association of Tamil Nadu (WEAT) in Tiruchi in 2007.
“I wanted to make better use of
my time after marriage, and felt that this course would be ideal. But the early
machine was manually operated with pedals, and quite slow,” says Santhosh Mary.
“After buying one, I realised that I would have to upgrade the technology to
make a profit.”
Investing in two semi-hydraulic
electrical units manufactured in Coimbatore became the turning point in her
business. “While I used to get just 200 plates out of a manual machine — and a
lot of leg pain because it was so tough to operate — suddenly, I was making up
to 1,000 in a day, minus the physical discomfort!” she says.
Today, Santhosh Mary operates her
business with 20 machines, and turns out over 3,000 plates per day. “When we
started out, each machine used to cost Rs. 3.5 lakhs. This has reduced to Rs.
2.8 lakhs as more people are getting into plate production. But the machines
for export orders cost up to Rs. 7 lakhs, because their dies are different,”
she says.
Going abroad
Santhosh Mary decided to look for
export orders once her plates began to get a steady clientele locally. “Rather
than going it alone, I felt it was better to let a professional agent handle
the marketing for export,” she says. “I decided to invest in new machines three
years ago for foreign orders only after I was convinced that there was an
assured demand for areca flatware.”
She has engaged the services of a
company based in Coimbatore for her exports and regional marketing.
With wholesale prices now fixed
at around Rs. 3.80 to Rs. 4 per 12-inch plate (for a pack of 1,000), Santhosh
Mary should technically be celebrating a boom period. But for the 20-odd areca
spathe plate industry players in and around Tiruchirapalli, success has been
conditional. “Though we wanted to raise our price only by 20 paise after the
plastics ban in January, we are being undercut by a glut of cheaper plates from
Karnataka,” she rues. “Areca farmers have already increased the spathe prices,
so our raw material is getting costlier.”
The supply of spathes has to be
managed as well, since it is available only during the first six months of the
year.
Even so, there have been some
unexpected bonuses. “Earlier, only temples were buying our small bowls
(called donnai ) to serve prasadam . After the plastics
ban, wedding and function organisers have been snapping up our donnais to
be used instead of plastic bowls,” says Santhosh Mary.
Temple festivals her busiest
times. Every year, she processes large orders, from 2,000 to 10,000 plates per
day exclusively for religious occasions.
Now diversifying into paper bag
production, Santhosh Mary is hopeful of finding a market for that as well. “We
have to relearn the importance of using eco-friendly products in our daily
life,” she says.
Punched out
The areca spathes, which are hard and woody
in texture, are soaked in water in specially built tanks for several hours
until they become pliant, and then drained well before they are ready to be
used. “If you make the plate when the spathe is too wet, you can end up with
fungal growths on the final product,” says Santhosh Mary, who has put one staff
member in charge of just the soaking and sorting of the spathes according to
size. “If the plates dried completely in the sunlight, they can last up to a
year in storage,” she says.
As a faint smell of charred wood
fills the workshop adjoining Santhosh Mary’s residence, the metal dies of the
machine punch out plates using heat compression. Workers manually fix the
spathe and remove the surplus each time. While utensils for the Indian market
are deeper (“since we use many gravies in our food,” explains Mary), those bound
for foreign shores are more shallow and angular in shape.
The intrepid businesswoman, has
come a long way from the day she attended a plate-making course organised by
the Women Entrepreneurs Association of Tamil Nadu (WEAT) in Tiruchi in 2007
