The Selfishness of Cambodian Jasmine Rice

…and after all that, I met a woman, and married her.

She was a poor Cambodian rice farmer. Her family and extended family members were all poor rice farmers. Her neighbors, her friends, and everyone else in her village were all poor rice farmers, too.

After our marriage, they became my family, my neighbors, and my friends. They would someday be the family, friends, and neighbors of my future children.

One might say that for me to help my family, my friends, and my neighbors “become less poor” was entirely selfish. I wouldn’t say that. But one might.

Being retired, I had the time to read up on the problem, using my cell phone to access the Internet from our rural village. The existence of the Internet, provided as a profitable business by private companies in a village where most people didn’t even have electricity, showed me the path: capitalism. I needed to find a way to help my new family, friends, and community earn more profit from the rice that they were already growing.

Indeed, a recent report from The World Bank told me that the primary factor that raised more Cambodians out of extreme poverty than anything else, in the decade 2003–2013, was a global increase in the price of rice.

If I could somehow de-commoditize Cambodian Jasmine Rice, then I could break it free from commodity prices. To succeed, I would need to add so much value to it that Western consumers would eagerly pay a lot more for it.

Now, I couldn’t just ask rice consumers “what do you want?” As Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’.” Or, to quote the late Steve Jobs, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

I looked at all of the obvious stuff, like organic and Fair Trade certification. However, these markets were already full of products from lower-cost producers, so they could not give Cambodian farmers an edge.

Amazingly, my neighbors were already growing the world’s best jasmine rice. That wasn’t just my opinion; it was already an established fact. Cambodian Jasmine Rice has been the top-scoring jasmine rice in The World’s Best Rice Competition in every year since Cambodia first entered in 2012. Even the Honorary President of Thailand’s rice exporter’s association (which sells most of the jasmine rice that’s imported into America) admitted, in 2014, that Cambodian Jasmine Rice “was, somehow, better than Thai.”

Yet Cambodian rice farmers still weren’t getting a premium price.

I thought: “I’ll just market the crap out of The World’s Best Jasmine Rice!”

…but if you follow that line of thought, you’ll realize that I would need to offer a guarantee: “This will be the best jasmine rice you’ve ever had, or your money back.”

Could I guarantee that?

I soon discovered that I could not, because jasmine rice is seasonal. Its unique fragrance, flavor, and tenderness come from naturally-occurring aromatic compounds, notably 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, abbreviated “2AP.” These compounds have their highest concentration immediately after jasmine rice is harvested and milled. After that, the 2AP evaporates very rapidly.

By the time “New Crop” jasmine rice reaches the USA from Southeast Asia, it has already lost half of its aromatic intensity. Within six months, it’s just “plain white rice.”

Furthermore, the very best variety of jasmine rice — Cambodia’s Phka Rumduol — can only be harvested once per year (in November). So, there is no year round supply of fresh jasmine rice.

That’s when I had my epiphany. It looked like this:

That’s right: my epiphany looked like frozen peas.

Peas are “naturally fresh” for an incredibly short time. The moment that they are harvested, the natural sugars that give them their delightful flavor start morphing into bland, mealy starch. However, by freezing fresh peas within 150 minutes of harvest — that’s just two and a half hours— they can stay harvest-fresh all year.

When thawed, frozen peas taste great. Even professional chefs say “wait until peas are in season, then buy frozen.” In the US, nearly every consumer has a bag of peas in their freezer. Frozen peas are so much better than dried peas, and so conveniently available year-round, that frozen peas have stolen nearly all of the consumer market away from dried peas, while also growing per capita pea consumption. Most American consumers buy frozen peas without ever realizing that they could, instead, buy dried peas. Frozen peas have become the de facto standard.

Studies have proven conclusively that freezing jasmine rice, and then keeping it frozen, would keep it “harvest fresh” for at least a year.

But, would anyone look for rice in the frozen food aisle? I figured, who cares? There’s no “frozen aisle” on Amazon.com. If I sold the rice using Amazon’s “Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA)” service, I could keep my long-term inventory in a deep-frozen warehouse, shifting pallets to a non-frozen FBA warehouse “on demand.” It would thaw while being trucked to the consumer, but that’s a feature, ensuring that the rice would arrive at the consumer’s doorstep “conveniently thawed and ready to cook.”

After researching all of the relevant costs, my spreadsheets spit out a price of $19.95 for a two-pound (907g) bag. That’s twelve times more than the $1.65/pound charged for Amazon’s best-selling jasmine rice, but we wouldn’t be trying to sell the most rice, we’d be selling the best rice. There’s always a niche market for the best of anything, at 10–20 times the price of the “commodity” product. Frozen peas started as a high-priced luxury item, too. In the future, as our village’s sales grew and our economies of scale mounted up, we’d be able to lower our prices to expand the market… just as happened with frozen peas.

I quickly filed a patent on “quick-freezing the world’s best jasmine rice to enable a year-round guarantee of ‘best in the world’ quality.” Without a patent, exporters in Thailand and Vietnam would copycat our frozen products at a lower price, and my village would once again be squeezed out by lower-cost producers. (That, by the way, is exactly what patents are for: to protect the weak innovator against the strong industry leader. If you want to argue that all patents are evil, you can write your own article.)

Establishing this product and growing its market could help my village enormously. Receiving a high premium for “aromatic intensity” could easily double or triple the profit that the village earned from its rice. They would not need to change how they farmed; they would just earn more for what they were already growing.

This all came together in mid-September 2015. In late October, I launched a KickStarter campaign to raise the capital needed to bring the first container of frozen rice to the USA. The KickStarter campaign failed, as I expected it would (sigh). KickStarters work best when their creators already have an extensive network of friends who are already committed to the idea, and I didn’t have time, between mid-September and late October, to build that.

I’m writing this in early February of 2016. I’m in Phnom Penh, trying to line up a partner. Ideally, I’ll find a Cambodian rice exporter who is eager to sell into the US market, and has the cash (or can get it) to fund the project’s first year or two of operations. After that, we should be cash flow positive, and start spewing profits like a firehose…more than enough to pay my village’s farmers a very good price. Explaining how this “frozen rice” strategy can help Cambodian exporters earn a profit is difficult, however, because it is so far outside of their experience (as disruptive, de-commoditizing ideas usually are).

Nonetheless, I must keep trying. The benefit to my village could be enormous, so…step by step. One day at a time. Sooner or later, one way or another, I will make this work.

In the meantime, if you’re visiting Cambodia — perhaps to see Angkor Wat, the world’s #1 tourist destination — then stop by my village. Come see The Real Cambodia. Let us show you around. And if you ever see AwardBest rice on Amazon, be sure to tell your friends “Hey! I read about that! It’s the world’s best jasmine rice!”

But, single guys, if you visit Cambodia, watch out, because…

…after all that, you might meet a woman, and marry her.