Plateful of success

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