If youre thinking about starting a new food business, be it a small bakery or a mass-scale catering service, getting your ingredients might be on top of your to-do list. Deciding where to get supplies, how much the price is and the quality of the food are just a small part of the headache.
Farina Situmorang and her friends at Catalyst Strategy encountered the same problem when they were starting their organic food product and came up with a new platform to answer the need.
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Two years ago, when we were creating Naked Granola and needing to find suppliers, we realized that ingredients are hard to find. We really had to scour and depend so much on our networks. And we had to check everything. The information is just not there, Farina said.
Its 2017, but all we have is trade expo where all suppliers and business owners meet. If you miss it, its going to be so difficult.
The team also talked to other food business players and found out that most of them only have a list of suppliers they depend their business on.
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Theres no transparency as well. Its all paper-based and theres a possibility to play with the price margin, for corruption, she added.
So, what is Samasta?
Samasta is a marketplace, like Amazon, Tokopedia or Sociolla, but it focuses on food supplies. Its website connects food suppliers and farmers to food and beverage business owners or anybody who needs supplies in a business capacity. Suppliers can sell their goods online and buyers can have more options if they need to compare one product to another.
Samasta does charge small transaction fee, but as theres no need for a physical store and both suppliers and buyers can connect without a third party, the price offered on the website is relatively lower than in regular market.
The platform had been operated in beta-mode for a while and was officially launched two months ago. So far, its catering to more than twenty restaurants and around fifty suppliers around Jakarta selling more than 200 product varieties.
While the idea of online food supply marketplace seems to make the transaction process easier, is pushing the use of technology really suitable for farmers?
Farina said that educating the farmers and suppliers is the key to the project.
We do most of the heavy lifting. We cant expect peoples behavior to change immediately, right? We dont want to be arrogant and say that this is completely needed and itll change their life. So we need to educate them, Farina said. So most of the time, when suppliers sign up with us, we help them to input the products (to the system), take pictures and come up with content so they can sell. We really help them. It takes some time, but its been going on well so far.
We also check every single one of them to maintain the quality of products sold in Samasta.
So, if Samasta promises easier way of purchasing food with controlled quality and relatively lower prices, can we, the general public with no food business but just love food, use the platform?
Of course, you can just sign up and buy them. Its built for business and corporate accounts in mind, but you can still get five kilos of meat or onions there! Farina said.