Our Story
Concerned for other's good and benefits
WHO WE ARE?
Tsara & Soa is a small distributor and retailer venture of vanilla beans and handicrafts produced directly from Madagascar.
Since 2020, we sell these Malagasy treasures with the goal of disrupting the business as usual model in which everyone seeks for one's profits while the local vanilla farmers are flooded by economic poverty, insecurity, and extreme weather events. Our motto is the recognition that everything is allowed, but not everything is not good and beneficial for all. We are driven by doing good to others during our lifetime and in our lifestyle. So, we have chosen to create a business model that is both Tsara (Malagasy), meaning good, and Soa (Malagasy) meaning beneficial to our venture, our wholesaler, and our indigenous vanilla farmers.
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OUR FOUNDATION STORY
We are two graduate students at Clark University who love people for no reason, share resources, skills, knowledge and advise to support our friends as much as we can without expecting any return from anyone. Our similar character has built up good friendship and potential collaboration in seeking for the good and benefits of others than only or owns. Regarding professional future, we both had a desire to build up our own company while caring about social causes. Then we met a woman from a family-owned vanilla and realized all social injustice, insecurity, and climate change are striking local farmer. Our desires and brainstorming become real since our application to the Ureka Challenge 2021 at Clark University.
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WHAT SOCIAL CAUSE?
Consumers can enjoy yummy vanilla cake but all vanilla farmers in Madagascar cannot even buy a portion of unflavored cake because they do not get the right price for their extenuating labor. Therefore, the main goal of Tsara&Soa is saving the vanilla business and the farmers’ socio-economic development in Madagascar.
The social venture aims at solving the problems of social injustice, poverty, insecurity, and climate change impacts, with a new retailing model. Large vanilla producers step on small-scale farmers, getting a major proportion of the market. The current market does not care about the social issues beating the local farmers. The sole objective was maximizing profits and becoming millionaires while local vanilla farmers gain only $1.3 a day on average and cannot feed their children nor send them to school. The fluctuation of the vanilla price aggravates this injustice. Also, the farmers are struck by the thief of vanilla beans and even murders. As if not enough disasters, climate change increases natural disasters such as stronger cyclones, destroying the plantations that took 3 to 5 years to mature.
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WHAT DO WE DO?
We have been thinking about founding a venture that generates good and benefits for a nation, a population, a community, to disrupt poverty while fostering economic and climatic resilience and realized. We also know that the vanilla business in Madagascar is in sorrow due to political, economical, health and climatic reasons... we desire to save this business.
Our mission is then disrupting business as usual scenarios and bringing a new sustainable trade model by using 50% of the revenue to offer back to the community of family-owned vanilla farmers by developing and implementing projects.
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WHAT DO WE WANT TO DO NEXT?
We start with Vanilla Beans but would love to extend this model to other products and in other countries as well.