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By David Mangurian The job of preserving cultural heritage is not just for architects, art historians and anthropologists, but also for cooks. For most people, food is more than mere sustenance, and traditional foods are cherished as a cultural icon, a last stand against the global homogenization of lifestyles.For three young Ecuadorian entrepreneurs, preserving culinary traditions --candy in their case-- has also become a profitable business. Their company, called Dulces Tradicionales del Ecuador (Traditional Ecuadorian Candies) was born four years ago when their business proposal was chosen as one of the seven winners of a contest for youths run by the the Ecuadorian nonprofit Esquel Foundation. The foundation would finance the winners with the help of an IDB grant. The company was founded by three Catholic University economics and business students, Marco Vintimilla, Esteban Vega and María Caridad Araujo, who had known each other since high school. "We wanted to enter, but we didn't know what to propose," says Vintimilla, now company marketing manager. They came up with a list of 40 possible money-making projects, including a beach bar in a park with volleyball courts and a factory to make wooden boxes for export companies. "We finally chose the traditional candy business because it seemed the easiest and wasn't that expensive to start," he said. "We saw potential there." The Esquel Foundation gave the trio some $3,500 to conduct market research before starting up the business. They assembled five focus groups of different ages. Among the things they learned: people liked the traditional sweets, but they had a hard time finding them, and they didn't like buying them in unsealed plastic bags. As a result of the sessions, the three founders decided on a brand name, Dulces de Antes (Old-Time Candies), and drew up plans for marketing and distribution. They hired a graphic designer who created a color logo and two types of packaging: smart-looking boxes showing beautiful full color pictures of the sweets, and see-through plastic containers for hanging on store racks. Next, the company founders invested about $10,000 of their savings and Esquel contributed another $15,000 as equity financing to start the business. One of the first challenges was to find people who were still making antique candies the traditional way, and who were capable of being reliable suppliers. "We asked our mothers and fathers what kind of sweets they used to eat, and where they got them," said Vintimilla. "They said they bought them from some old lady on such and such a street. So we went there and actually found people who were still making them." One of the traditional candy producers they found was Luis Banda Jr., a third generation maker of a peanut confection called colaciones. Despite earning a university degree in engineering, he decided to continue the family business of making sweets the traditional way, using his grandmother's secret recipe. It's a physically demanding job, he said, heating roasted peanuts with melted sugar, vanilla and lemon juice in a heavy brass kettle hanging from an open window beam, swinging the kettle by hand back and forth over a hot charcoal fire so that the mixture hardens into a coating around each peanut, then adding more liquid until the layers build up to a white ball about the size of a marble. Each 10-kg batch takes three hours to make. "There used to be 45 or 50 people who were making colaciones in Quito," says Luis Banda Jr., 78 years old. "Now there's nobody left but us because most of the people my age have died. Their children haven't wanted to continue making colaciones because this work is really hard, burning your belly all day long in front of the fire." "We'll have to see if my son will want to do this," says Banda Jr. "It's going to be difficult." Not all the suppliers the company found come from a long line of specialized producers. One example is their supplier of alfajores, a light pastry cookie with a middle layer of dulce de leche, a caramel-like paste traditionally made with left-over milk at dairy farms. The woman who makes these alfajores learned the trade after her husband died and she needed to earn money to survive. Now she has hired an employee and constructed two large ovens. They also found suppliers for dulce de leche fudge, guayabas fruit paste squares, and manizado, a peanut brittle made by baking a mixture of roasted peanuts, sesame seeds and caramel in sheets. But some traditional candies apparently have been lost forever. "Everybody asks if we are going to sell mistelas," says Vintimilla, referring to melt-in-your-mouth sugar figures filled with sugar liqueur. Everyone in Quito that is at least 35 years old has tried them at least once in their lives. But they are fragile and very hard to make. The last mistelas maker, they found, died eight years ago. The fledgling company made its first sale in 1996, landing a contract to supply an Ecuadorian corporation with 1,000 candy gift packs for Christmas presents. At that time Dutraec had no employees, so Vintimilla and his associates packaged the candy themselves in small traditional clay bowls fitted into small straw baskets. Finding customers was not as easy as they thought it would be, says Vintimilla. "The hardest part was convincing someone to buy the same product that has been on the market for years, but now comes in a different package. They were asking us, ‘OK, how do I know it is good quality?' Dutraec now employs six people who package sweets purchased from suppliers. Sales had risen to $6,500 a month before Ecuador plunged into an economic crisis in February. Despite a recession that continues to hurt retailers throughout the country, the company's sales have remained steady. "Many small companies are going bankrupt," says Vintimilla, "but we're not firing anyone." In fact, after Dutraec gets its seal of approval from the government food and drug agency, consumers will be able to buy Dulces de Antes in supermarkets. This, added to recent additions to the Dulces de Antes product line --a guayaba and dulce de leche roll, sugar-coated dulce de leche, and coco- leches (coconut sugar balls)-- is proving that antique candy apparently has a bright future in Ecuador. For more information about Dulces de Antes, contact the company via e-mail at dutraec@hotmail.com. |
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