San Jose Kasoy Processors

Today along with Melissa and Enera from City Agri, I had the opportunity to visit the Kasoy processors of San Jose. Design is a complicated process, and although cosmetically it seems like a system of beautifying the world, the majority of its process is spent travelling around looking at things, asking lots of questions and organizing the information retrieved from that process. The actual making part, although not easy is a relatively short and systematic part of the whole process. After having been somewhat frustrated last week by slow government processes, today standing in a small bamboo hut with a thatched roof asking question about how the Kasoy processors go about their daily lives, something turned on inside me. I suddenly realized what a wonderful learning experience this really is.

The purpose of my internship here is to help people, and to make it possible for them and others to continue getting help after I leave, and as such, working with these women to help develop a language to represent themselves is going to be a pleasure. For most small product developers here packaging their wares consists of buying bulk plastic bags or generic containers from a local store and labels are produced through small reprographics stores who help groups pick a bad font or two.

The Kasoy processors are groups of local women who shell and roast or fry fresh cashew nuts purchased from local farmers. They buy the cashews in bulk, dry them out and then store them. The head of the one group I spoke to buys and stores the materials and then other women shell and roast them at home, while she does the packaging and sells them at the market. Other groups who were there today, shell and roast but sell their products to sellers at the markets who then package the nuts and apply their own labels. For these women, they are avoiding the costs of permits from the City Mayor's office, the Department of Trade and Industry and the taxes that go with being a registered business.

The goal will be to both look into who is actually their customer base, what kind of packaging solutions might be possible, who else they might sell to, how they might maximize working together to reduce costs, and finally coming up with a graphic branding language that will truly represent them and their products as unique and different from the other similar products already being sold in the stores. Their current generic labels have, like most local products, a bad character font, next to a drawing of the item, with a superimposed version of the image in the background. Oh, we can do so much better than this. (see more photos)