General Manager of Sun International encourages businesses to look beyond their own expertise

How to scale up a successful local sourcing strategy into an independent sustainable business model?...

Build it in phases and don’t do it on your own.

These would be my top two recommendations, based on my recent involvement with one of our BIF-supported projects in Zambia: Sun International Hotels.

Since 2004, as part of both its corporate social investment (CSI) and procurement strategy, Sun International manages a local sourcing programme through which its two hotels purchase fresh fruit and vegetables from smallholders in the Livingstone and Kazungula districts.

Sun International’s local sourcing programme is in transition from its current model, which employs agents to manage collection and delivery of produce from networks of smallholders to the company, to a more efficient and sustainable business model that operates around a packhouse facility, i.e. bulking centre to provide a point for collecting, grading, sorting and packaging the fresh produce, ready for market. Given this transition and the greenhouse technology identified to increase smallholder resilience to climate change, Sun International has asked for BIF support to provide recommendations on achieving more sustainable routes to market for smallholder goods, and to increase smallholder capacity.

Developing a gradual approach for scaling up was one of the key recommendations for Sun International provided by the team of consultants with the following key steps at the core of the suggested phased approach:

1. Creation of a bulking centre to provide a point for collecting, grading, sorting and packaging the fresh produce, ready for market
2. Development of a marketing strategy for smallholder produce
3. Implementation of climate change adaptation strategies and climate resilient technologies for participating farmers
4. Development of a programme funding model which enables the model to transition from donor to commercial capital.

Further details about the suggested approach are available here.

The need to form partnerships to realise its vision is also a central part of the provided recommendations. This seems to be fully in line with what Sun’s General Manager, Joanne Selby, considers crucial for scaling up the initiative:

In our recent interview with her, “acknowledging that certain things are not part of your core business expertise, learning from others and existing models as well as forming the right partnerships” were amongst Joanne’s top recommendations to other entrepreneurs wanting to move from blueprint to scale.

Watch the whole interview with Sun Hotels, General Manager Joanne Selby here.