Danone Ecosystem – Résultats de la mission

Article en anglais

Reminder on Margarita: a micro-farming project encompassing both a social and economic vision

The genesis of Margarita goes back to 2008 when Danone de Mexico and Technoserve – an American NGO which helps micro-entrepreneurs in poor areas to build businesses– first tried to launch a mixed farming project that they finally had to give up because of the global economic crisis. Despite this unforeseen scenario, Mariano Salceda, Purchasing Director at Danone de Mexico, kept in his mind the idea of implementing a social project and it finally came up with Margarita a little more than a year ago.
For Danone, the strategic vision is quite disruptive and nevertheless very simple: to create a “game changing” model that could help Mexico to tackle a double issue – reducing milk production deficit & sustaining small and medium farmers’ development across the country.Margarita’s project is funded by the Danone Ecosystem fund and co-managed by Technoserve and Danone de Mexico so that they benefit from each other’s skills.

Objectives of our mission

So far, 103 farmers have entered the project and the objective is to reach 400 farmers by 2014. One key goal is also to enable these producers to multiply their income by three.
But to do so and scale-up properly, some obstacles have to been tackled:

• At Danone Ecosystem level:
  The challenge was to find a way to assess the social impact of Margarita program

• At the Collect Center level:
  The Collect Center collects the milk from the micro-farmers, control its quality and send it to Danone transformation plant. Its challenges are three-fold:
  - To follow up the global volumes and the quality of the milk
  - To follow up the performance of each micro-farmer
  - To find an incentive for the farmers to improve their quality

• At the micro-farmers level:
  The challenge was to help them to become familiar with accounting and finance so that they could get access to credit

  Conclusions of our mission

  We spent three weeks in Tepatitlan, where the Collect Center is based, and worked there with the help of technicians (those who visit the farmers each month to collect information for the Mexican Gouvernment), TechnoServe and Margarita’s representatives.

  To face these challenges, we designed three tools:

• A “KPI’s tool” for the social follow-up of the project. It processes economic, social and technical information on a sample of 60 micro-farmers
• A “Collect Center tool”, which enables Margarita to follow up, month after month, and for each farmer, the volumes delivered to Danone, the salary they should therefore get and the quality of their milk. Above all, this tool calculates a bonus that the micro-farmers may receive depending on their performance, that is to say the quality of the milk.
• A “Credit tool” that the farmer has to fill out each month, and which enables him to build a P&L and make forecasts

  Many thanks to Danone Ecosystem, TechnoServe and Margarita’s teams for their help on this very intersting mission!

  Also available in: Anglais