IPB Students Achieved the Best Team Award in the Global Ideapreneur Week 2018

A group of students from Bogor Agricultural University (IPB), consisting of Bagas Adjie Prabowo, Yahya Ayyasy, and Latiful Akbar introduced the idea of palm sugar sociopreneurship in the Global Ideapreneur Week 2018 that was held by Malaysia Global Innovation and Creativity Center in Malaysia, 3-5 April 2018. Not only had been selected to be the group that had a chance to present the idea among other 60 start-up teams, the IPB team was also granted an award as the best team among other 6 (six) best team nominees.

"Basically, we are driven to elaborate the concept of palm sugar sociopreneurship based on the high potential that both materials have. However, the potential has not been utilized fully which can be seen from the use of sugar as the main ingredients of only a few products, such as porridge and traditional foods” as stated by the team leader.

The scale of demand for palm sugar and coconut sugar in the market is still low, it is also exacerbated by economic transactions that are disadvantageous for farmers. Farmers sell their products to the middlemen, whereas the middlemen sell the palm and coconut sugar products with the price that can be up to a hundred times higher than the sale price determined by the farmers. Thus, the IPB team was trying to offer a system that can give more benefits to farmers to gain profits in the future by removing the middlemen from the market chain.

Through this system, farmers will not need to sell their products to the middlemen anymore. They will cooperate with entrepreneurial system developed by IPB team with the emphasis on profit sharing. This system will facilitate farmer's businesses, so that the business will have better packaging, branding, marketing, etc. Hopefully the profits earned by farmers will be greater because the product becomes more attractive and innovative.

Palm and coconut sugar are sweet in taste with low glycemic index unlike other source of sugar, such as sugar cane with higher glycemic index. It is expected that palm and coconut sugar can be developed further to be the main export commodities from Indonesia, considering the high demand of the products in other countries.