In the food deserts of Jakarta - a social business leads the way?
Instead of eating home-cooked food, people in these neighborhoods buy the cheapest meals they can: food from street vendors. The equivalent of 20 cents in Jakarta can buy a meal of rice fried with soy sauce and a little chicken, or deep fried fish cakes. Ten cents will buy a snack. Overcrowded, kitchenless housing has given rise to a culture of street food that has done wonders for tourism in Asian cities — the most crowded parts of the planet. But it has also condemned tens or hundreds of millions of people to an almost nutrition-free diet.
Mercy Corps couldn’t think of anything traditional that a nongovernmental group could do about this. So it did something very untraditional: in April, 2009, it started a healthy street food business called Kedai Balitaku, or My Child’s Café, that has since spun off into a for-profit company. “The idea was to provide access while raising awareness about healthy food and creating economic opportunity,” said Sean Granville-Ross, Mercy Corps’ Indonesia country director.
Here's a social business that's been using the market mechanism to their advantage in order to crack the tough problem of healthy nutrition in slums in Jakarta. Not replacing existing efforts to change behavior long-term through education, but rather complementing it with the necessary 'infrastructure' for healthy eating, they are creating a chain of street food vendors who sell healthy, but at the same time cheap food.
However, as the article points out - this business (as many others) are facing the challenge posed when playing by the 'market rules' - how to price your product appropriately when profits is not the motive? How to compete on quality when the consumer's choice necessarily is constrained by price (and usually based on a perception of 'quantity')?
Read the full article at NYTimes: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/in-food-deserts-oases-of-nutr...
