Find the transcript of my interview with Marie Cavosora below.
INTRO
Welcome to Exploring Filipino Kitchens. I’m your host, Nastasha Alli.
This episode, we’re talking with Marie Cavosora, who leads a team of dairy entrepreneurs in the Philippines, and who founded a company called Calaboo Dairy.
Here’s a question for you. Have you ever had carabao milk butter? Well, actually, let me start over. You SHOULD have carabao milk butter. This outrageously smooth, creamy butter is the best thing you could ever put on a split pandesal, fresh out of the oven, when you visit the Philippines. I swear you’ll wonder why no one talks about this more.
Well, today we’re gonna change that, and talk about carabao milk and the products you can make from it.
Calaboo makes three things, and they make them really well. They make yogurt, butter and cheese, with milk from naturally grass-fed carabaos - that’s the Philippine water buffalo - and you’ll see these carabaos dot the Philippine countryside. They include with additional variants as well, like yogurt sweetened with native honey or coconut sugar. Each of these products are so good. Honestly if you’ve never had carabao dairy, I recommend you make it a point to sample some on your next visit to the Philippines.
Every one of these foods are delicious because of the quality its main ingredient - carabao milk, which, compared to cow’s milk, contains almost double the calcium and phosphorus, over 30% more protein, and half the cholesterol of cow’s milk.
And the thing is, in the Philippines - 99% of its dairy consumed in the country, comes from outside the country. That’s basically all of it. That means that if you’re in the Philippines - or anywhere in the world, really, but eating something that was made in the Philippines and has some type of dairy product in it - like ube ice cream or powdered polvoron - that stuff has woven its way in and out of the country more times than you can count and more than any other type of food.
That’s basically what prompted this episode - because, frankly, I know nothing about carabao milk! But I’m familiar with it and I remember seeing it a lot, even driving an hour or two outside the city you can easily spot a few carabaos along the side of the highway. I remember eating kesong puti - which is basically a fresh cheese made with carabao milk and salt.
Kesong puti is really close to halloumi, another fresh cheese, in terms of taste and texture - but the stuff that’s prepared close to where you eat it, with that full-fat, lightly grassy and floral note to it - oh man, nothing compares.
So because it doesn’t have any other preservatives, it’s meant to be consumed the same day, it doesn’t have a long shelf life, and is really kind of the specialty product you have when you visit provinces like Laguna, where they’re quite known for kesong puti. Anyway, this stuff is delicious and creamy and rich. Typically, people fry slabs of it in butter, and use it as a sandwich filling, again with pandesal. Frankly, I love fried cheese, so that love for it is there, but after I head that you could make other products with carabao milk - especially the butter and yogurt - I just had to try them for myself.
Carabaos are ubiquitous across the Philippines, and that makes me wonder - why aren’t more carabaos raised for their milk, instead of being used as draft animals?
The answers to this are pretty complex, but with thanks to Marie, I think I’ve started to understand the problem a little bit better. I do have to apologize though, the audio quality for this interview isn’t great. But I’ll step in where we need it, and I hope you learn as much from this interview as I did.
We start off, with Marie Cavosora, at the Enchanted Farm in the province of Bulacan.
INTERVIEW
05:10 About Marie
MC: My name is Marie Cavosora, I’m a social entrepreneur for CalaBoo. I am currently a SEED teacher - SEED is the school here at GK Enchanted Farm. It stands for “School for Experiential Entrepreneurial Development”. I’m a teacher, I teach communications. I’m a mentor, and also a “dorm aunt” or “dorm tita”, which means that I live in the dorm with the students part time. The other half of the time I’m in Manila to tend to CalaBoo.
NA: Calaboo’s products include a fresh cheese called “keso carino” with mama boo and baby boo, for the carabao milk mozzarella and bocconcini-style cheeses. There’s the butter, called “boo-ter”, I know - and “yogi boo” for their greek-style yogurt line. Clearly I’m hooked. So I ask Marie to tell us a bit more about how Calaboo, as the brand, came to be.
MC: It’s a social enterprise, but we purvey naturally nutritious, healthy, premium carabao-based products. So dairy products from carabaos that have been grass fed. With the push on natural goodness - because as we know, milk, when you go back to the basics of it, is actually a very nutritious food. So we want to focus on that and create dairy products in the Philippines that should be more common.
When you think about carabaos in the Philippines, it’s our native animal, most commonly used as a draft animal. We’re an agricultural country, but also a developing country, so most farmers still use carabaos to plow their land. So while we have about 3 million carabaos in the Philippines, most of them owned by smallholder farmers, only 35,000 are used for dairy. Here, it’s an overworked, underrated, docile animal. I think what carabaos are, is very synonymous to the farmer. But, if you look at the carabao, which is a tropical animal - the milk that it produces is premium milk, compared to cow’s milk.
07:40 What's in carabao milk?
MC: Let’s just pretend both of them are grass fed, so it’s an even playing field. On a drop by drop comparison, carabao milk is healthier, in that it has…
NA: According to Marie, almost double the calcium and phosphorus, is high in vitamins A, B, K and E, all important to childhood development, and half the amount of cholesterol in cow’s milk. Carabao milk in itself is higher in fat, yes but it’s the good kind - with complex fatty acids, both saturated and unsaturated, in amounts that are beneficial to the body.
MC: The richness makes for better, creamier, more richly textured dairy products.
NA: With that higher fat content, farmers can actually make more dairy products per litre, compared to cow’s milk.
Since I wasn’t able to actually see the carabaos being milked, Marie adds that, usually, what really strikes people about fresh carabao milk is its colour. Carabao milk is a pearly white, compared to cow’s milk, which tends to be a little more cream-coloured.
That tinge of colour in cow’s milk comes from carotene - like the beta carotene in carrots. And Marie explains, what really makes carabao milk nutritionally superior to cow’s milk is that, with the carabao - it’s already done all the work for you in terms of processing carotene, which allows your body to absorb vitamin A efficiently, to keep things like your eyes, skin and bones in good condition.
Next I ask Marie, what exactly did she first focus on when they started CalaBoo?
A big part of why I was really interested in learning about CalaBoo was because I want to share with people that you’re absolutely right - people who visit rural areas of the Philippines do associate the carabao with farming land. And I agree with you too, they’re under utilized for dairy. In your early conception of CalaBoo, was that a big driver for what you focused on?
10:10 How Calaboo started
MC: Well, yes and no. Because really, the social enterprise exists to help the farmers. Despite the fact that the country is booming, farmers have been at the bottom of the economic class, for a very long time. They continue to be hungry, they continue to be in survival mode. It’s crazy, there’s a huge number of them.
NA: According to 2015 stats published by the Philippine government, nearly 35% of Filipinos who live below the poverty line work as farmers.
MC: I thought, if we really want to help them, what are the things we can do, to really improve their lives, that’s not so radical. And that isn’t about giving money, because it’s never just about giving money.
NA: So what happened is that, when Marie arrived at the Gawad Kalinga Enchanted Farm - and shortly after, decided to stay - she took over an existing carabao dairy enterprise that, unfortunately, was abandoned by its initial owner.
MC: I wasn’t necessarily thinking about dairy, but when it opened up then I started thinking about it. And at that time, they were only selling kesong puti, some cream cheese, flavoured milk. I thought, well I’m not going to do that. Why would I when everyone else and their mothers and fathers have done that, when you think about carabao milk.
NA: Many places in the Philippines have their own versions of kesong puti - that fresh cheese - and pastillas, a milk candy. But these foods aren’t really consumed on a regular basis - as Marie describes, they’re typically pasalubong, which is food that you bring home as a treat for loved ones when you come back from vacation or someplace you normally don’t visit. They’re a cottage industry in these towns, with sales that peak during the summer months and around Christmas time and holy week. The rest of the year, it’s hard for these farmers and dairy producers to make a constant living, so in that sense, Marie says she realized that…
MC: I want to make mine different. So…
NA: In the process of drawing up her business plans, one of the first questions she had was to answer - how do we get Filipinos to even eat cheese?
12:25 "It was a hard sell"
MC: I know in the Philippines, we’re not a cheese eating country. We eat Eden cheese, which isn’t really cheese but a cheese product. So for a lot of people, they don’t eat cheese on a regular basis. It was gonna be a hard sell. We actually started with aged cheese. We had a partner who was interested, so we said let’s talk about white labelling it for the time being. It helped me focus on what these products are, and really think things through, what the process would be like to sell it.
NA: But, at the end of the day, it’s just hard to make aged cheese in the Philippines - given the tropical climate, humidity, resources like machinery and temperature controlled aging rooms you need, refrigeration and other stuff that Marie would need to produce those cheeses on a profitable scale. They are a business, after all.
13:25 Carabao dairy as a premium product
MC: We tried it for a bit and had lots of positive responses, but it helped put CalaBoo on the map in terms of innovative carabao dairy products. So it started there, but I already had it in my head that I wanted it to be a premium product, because carabao milk as a raw material is premium. It is a superior product to cow’s milk, especially the commodity stuff that’s out there. I want to position it as the champagne of dairy, or the foie gras of dairy, or the wagyu beef of dairy. And people need to see it that way.
14:10 What the industry looks like
MC: Actually, supply is very low, of carabao milk, and milk in general. So let me just provide the business aspect of it. The Philippines imports 99% of our dairy. 99%. 80% of that is in milk powder form.
NA: So I want to let that sink in for a minute. An astounding 99% of the dairy in the Philippines, whether in cheese or milk form, is not produced in the country and has to be imported. 99%. I keep saying it because it’s a crazy number, and yes, totally in line with what I thought it would be! I think I may have tasted fresh cow’s milk once in my lifetime, before I came to Canada.
And looking at other southeast asian countries - like China, with the exception of Tibet and other mountainous northern regions - places near the equator don’t have a strong cheese making heritage because we just haven’t had a reason or really, the long-standing capacity to age and keep cheeses. They thrive in cold and can’t survive in hot weather.
This is also why the only kind of milk that most Filipinos know is the powdered kind - shelf stable, very widely consumed, relatively cheap, and taught to most that milk is the key, it’s good for our bodies, and we need milk for the calcium. Everyone in school from the 1920s onward knows this. But then again, Filipinos prior to that time survived just fine without milk. I just can’t get over how much we depend on this amount of imported milk. 80% in dried, powdered form. I would love to see that shift towards other, more sustainable sources of calcium. Which brings us back to carabao milk.
MC: You see an opportunity in supply and an opportunity in the market. I want to focus on quality, I want to focus on producing real good carabao milk.
NA: Marie explains that if we broke down these statistics further, we’d see that on average, people in the Philippines consume about 22 kilos of dairy a year - that’s like 22 one litre boxes of milk, not that much. But if we look at the actual amount of dairy that’s produced in the entire country - we could only make about 200 grams of dairy per person, for the year, if we relied on milk made in the Philippines. So, of course we need to import.
MC: It’s ridiculous. At least in my lifetime, or the next two or three generations, we wouldn’t be able to produce that much. And we don’t want to.
NA: So then the question for her, became…
MC: How do we now really honour and valourize carabao milk as a raw material. That’s really the positioning for us, for CalaBoo. How are we doing that? We want to demonstrate how delicious the end products are.
17:05 Partnering with the Philippine Carabao Centre
MC: Fortunately, we have a partnership with the Philippine Carabao Centre. It’s a government agency, but they restore your faith in government and the people who run things. I mean, rightly so that the Philippines has a reputation for corrupt government agencies. However, there are also amazing people there who have a true love for country. I’m so blessed to be working with them. Very innovative, professional, responsive. They just know their stuff.
NA: And so in the end..
MC: The farmers, when we train them, we can now train them to produce high-value milk that we will purchase at a higher price, because they’re able to produce high-quality milk on a regular basis. Our target is really smallholder farmers from different parts of the country.
NA: So how did the journey start for Marie?
18:20 Marie's journey
MC: From the beginning I said, okay we don’t have a lot of money. So how do we optimize this? And for me, I see the enterprise more like a potluck party. With everybody coming together bringing the best of what they have to offer. And together we create this really amazing experience.
Tito Tony - Tony Meloto - said when you dream for your country, it can’t be small. It has to be big. And I went, yes, I’m not just going to make a livelihood project. This is gonna be big. This is the reason why I stayed in the Philippines.
My background is, I’m a balikbayan, I lived in the States for 20 years. I lived in San Francisco before I moved back to the Philippines. It was because of the work of Gawad Kalinga that I decided to stay. I had an opportunity to do something like this, knowing that my efforts wouldn’t go to waste because of the network and platform of GK. It really gave me hope that I could bring about something as audacious as, you know, helping build the dairy industry in the Philippines. So I thought in that case, I’m not gonna build a little dairy farm where I could make these little products. There’s a lot of resources currently available to us.
NA: Resources like factories, that Marie wouldn’t have to put up capital funds to build, because of their partnerships with organizations like the Philippine Carabao Centre.
MC: They’re very well versed, they provide support and have relationships with the cooperatives. I thought, at this point, while we’re starting, there’s no need to start from the ground. So I identified partners who could work with us, and I would be frank with them. This is why we exist. We want to help the farmers, these are values of integrity and excellence and transparency. If you don’t want to be part of that, it’s okay, the right people will come. It’s having those kinds of frank conversations.
20:15 "Everything is about relationships"
MC: We talk about god and faith. I mean, try having that kind of conversation in the States. That kind of personal relationship evolves, you know, in the Philippines, where everything is about relationships. Even now, a lot of people are realizing that relationships are really what makes the world go round. I’m starting here, I’ve got nothing. I just have an idea and a big crazy dream. I have no money to invest. I have some to support myself, as I work on this, at least I can feed myself. This big dream was shared, without any money. So what could I do to make this stuff happen?
I know in the Philippines we tend to do things on our own. I gotta start my own thing, start my own project. But what’s the point, when we’re really not maximizing the resources we have available? It’s about the [idea of] bayanihan, right. As we say here, to borrow an African proverb, if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, do it together. It’s so much so like that. It was adjustment for me, having come from the States - and not just California, I lived in New York, Toronto, Hong Kong, fast paced cities. To actually slow down and nurture relationships, to really breathe, make that happen and work together. Otherwise, the whole mission, and the reason we exist, goes away. Those were our ground rules, the values we shared with everyone who wanted to work with us.
NA: And so CalaBoo launched in November 2016, at the Gawad Kalinga Enchanted Farm.
MC: We hadn’t taken on investors at this time. We had people who had expressed interest, but what we needed were people who could actually make stuff happen.
NA: And some of those things that have “happened” for Marie and her growing team include developing and market testing those products they made from carabao milk. The kesong puti, their version of the fresh cheese, this thick, greek-style yogurt, called Yogi Boo, and butter. Oh my god, the butter. I ask Marie to tell us more.
22:25 Starting with kesong puti
MC: We started with, already in my head, knowing it would be a premium product. It’s not gonna be pastillas or kesong puti. But I also wanted to work on what’s familiar. So let’s take kesong puti, for example. It’s really good cheese, but when you think about it, it’s really similar to mozzarella di bufala, almost the same animal. So what makes it different? Why are people willing to pay this much for that, versus this?
NA: Ok, so this is a familiar concept. People hesitate on spending money for something that holds a lower, somewhat “less” value for them, however they define it. Like for people who have no problem paying $30 a plate for dinner at a French restaurant, but won’t even consider that for a Chinese or Indian restaurant. In the Philippines, this means people spend upwards of a thousand pesos on Italian mozzarella that’s imported, which, you know, is good - but to not consider, or even try, local water buffalo cheese, and try to make room for those kinds of products on your menu, if you’re a chef, is just such a missed opportunity. And I know that you can’t make room for it if there’s no demand, but then there’s another opportunity. What would it take, for example, to convince a thousand people in Manila - like, everyone in an office building in Makati - if we could convince those people who pay a lot of money for gourmet pizza, to ask those restaurants to start using kesong puti - couldn’t that kickstart demand?
Marie, of course, says there’s a long way to go before they even get there. They’ve got a lot of challenges up ahead, for the industry itself, too. The main problem with kesong puti right now is that…
MC: [The problem with] most kesong puti, at the moment, is it doesn’t melt. They’re super soft and airy, but when you heat it, it doesn’t melt, it just dries up. Some people fry it, which kind of makes it unhealthy. So I said okay, let’s make something that combines both. I want a kesong puti that melts. We were at the Philippine Carabao Centre, I was there for three days with them and in those three days, we made lots of stuff, we came up with 8 products. It was so fun. The butter came out of that, the Mama Boo and Baby Boo came out of that three-day creative session.
Because I had the opportunity to live out in the west, and be in the forefront of a lot of things, I thought why don’t we make this cheese like that, so it has the features of kesong puti - it’s light when fresh, which mozzarella is not. But when you heat it, it melts. How could we get that? And we actually came up with it. We called it Keso Carino.
So our brand is CalaBoo, and our products - Mama Boo, shaped like a mozzarella ball, like a fist - and of course if there’s a Mama Boo, there has to be a Baby Boo, shaped like bocconcini. It had good reception, but the challenge is it has a two-week shelf life. So it’s short, and we can’t price it as cheaply as [regular] kesong puti, but it’s comparable to fresh mozzarella. But who are the people who buy fresh mozzarella? Usually, they’re restaurants who are very cost-conscious. Unfortunately, the chefs are still thinking, well it’s better to have imported products. But it’s growing, and actually Mama Boo is one of our best selling cheeses.
The thing is, because we pay more for the carabao milk, we’re adding a premium to it, because that’s what we want. What’s the fastest way to uplift farmers, is to pay more, to pay fair prices for their product. They have cost of goods [to worry about]. It’s not an easy job, taking care of carabaos. Why don’t we make it financially rewarding for them. That’s why the cost is higher than what’s common, since we have to factor in so many things. And if you can’t afford it, don’t buy it, it’s not a big deal, let’s not even talk about that.
NA: When Marie was in the US, she says, she often ate yogurt - the thick greek style ones, like Chobani and Fage (fa-yeh). So she thought, what about carabao milk yogurt? With it being really rich and creamy, that could work. However…
MC: Yogurt lasts only two, actually three weeks, even four…but we can’t print that, because if [customers] don’t handle them properly…but really, for people who know yogurt, they’re okay to eat it later, specially if it’s unopened. There’s a lot of education we still have to do here, but ultimately, it’s how good your product is. No amount of marketing can lift up a product that’s not good. You don’t need a lot of marketing if your product’s really good, and you get the right people to talk about it. Fortunately, chef Miko Aspiras…
NA: Who’s an acclaimed pastry chef in the Philippines, and someone I actually went to school with…
27:55 Partnering with chefs
MC: In fact, if it weren’t for him - honestly, he was one of the first chefs who supported us - it really gave us the courage to go forward. And chef Margarita Fores, she uses our butter. These are like chefs in top restaurants. You can imagine how premium it is. There’s also an added ‘premium’ because supply is dwindling, and we have to help more dairy farmers produce class A milk. That’s where our social impact is. If supply is low, that’s fine, because it forces us to really work with the farmers, which is really what the whole intention of the enterprise is. So it’s a lot more work, but it now becomes like a very finely tuned process, from the beginning to end.
At the farm, we’re very lucky because we’re able to taste test it, across many kinds of palates. Across socio-economic classes, cultural - we have French interns here, Germans, Egyptians, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Japanese, Korean - they get to taste it, and if they say it’s good, you know it’s good.
NA: And then, out comes the butter.
29:00 Out comes THE BUTTER
MC: I mean, who doesn’t love butter? So now we have these products, and we’re focusing on butter. After all that, [we realized] we had to have clear messaging. While a lot of people like the cheese and yogurt, as a business, we have to think long-term, scaling up….butter is our flagship product that we really want to spend our energy on, to talk about it at length. A butter consumer may not necessarily eat yogurt, so those are our indicators. Butter has a lot of uses. You can put it on pasts, on really good bread, on fish, to finish your steak. Right now, with the ketogenic diet everyone’s talking about, it’s the perfect candidate.
NA: For people listening, I’m eating….this is the butter, right? This is delicious. I want to eat the whole tub. It’s like…okay, this might not be the best analogy, but when I was really little, what I remember is that my parents would go to Subic Bay, for vacations and what not, and they would always bring back Queensland butter, the thing in the red tin. This is obviously not that, but back then, my parents associated that as a premium product.
30:30 How Filipino products are viewed
NA: Bringing back the conversation to how carabao products are viewed, too, it’s also a larger conversation of why western products are always viewed as superior to Philippine products. And that’s what I’d like to discover on my visit here, speaking with local entrepreneurs who are producing products that are proudly Filipino made. It’s quite exciting to me, because working with mostly second-generation Filipino chefs - even if they don’t remember much about the Philippines, maybe only go back once every 10 years to visit relatives and not much else - there’s that hunger in them to learn more about products here, because there’s a lot more awareness about Filipino culture and social issues in the Philippines. They grow up in western societies where there’s a lot of emphasis on sourcing local and supporting agriculture and all that. So those kinds of ideas, for them, are a big driver to learn about what’s here in the Philippines, and knowing these types of products exist is really encouraging to me. I’m excited to go to them, and say when you’re in the Philippines next, you HAVE to try these. Then learning about the social impact that supporting those types of products have, is a very big draw for them.
MC: It’s true. Because let’s face it, in the Philippines, we’ve never been known for excellent products, right. Especially the ones made to help people - the “pity purchase” that you buy because you feel bad. But now the conversation is, let’s create world class products that people want for its own merit. This whole drive for excellence is relatively new. “Philippine made” means something - not like shabby production, but when you think of something made in Italy, for example, you expect excellence, there’s the expectation of quality. What we want - though it’s gonna take time - there are some leading products out there already, specially based on our own natural resources, that makes it really compelling [to say they’re made in the Philippines].
We are a rich agricultural country, our biodiversity in the Philippines is extensive. We have a lot of species that aren’t available anywhere else in the world. But we haven’t been able to optimize it. We haven’t been able to really tap that. We haven’t given it the value it deserves.
NA: And one example that Marie gives us - to illustrate this kind of “value” that foods and other native products from the Philippines aren’t getting - is with my favourite animal. The pig.
MC: I was reading this article about the native pig. They’re really really good pigs…some have actually been known to be extinct. Here, we value it, not so much but we value it enough - we raise them for lechon. We see their value, but not their value with a capital V. Like, we’re actually sitting on a gold mine.
NA: And that value with a capital V, is so integral to shifting the perception that Marie talks about, when it comes to local Philippine products. She explains that the question, now, for carabao dairy, really becomes: how do we create a model that we can replicate and bring to farmers across the countryside?
34:10 Bringing farmers in
MC: We have this amazing product, how do we now bring it down to the level of the farmer, who’s living very far away, with hardly any access to the market. So the idea is, we organize farmers with the help of the Philippine Carabao Center, and Gawad Kalinga, farmers. Train them to produce class A milk consistently. There [will be] this facility nearby where they make the butter. Because of the brand, CalaBoo, which would now stand for premium and quality and just really good taste…then there’s a market for it. We can send it to Manila, we already have interest in Singapore and the US, even locally with Baguio and Davao. That’s what makes it a compelling and promising proposition. There’s demand already for this product. So now, we can just produce in all these places, and help satisfy the local market. It’s a well thought out, I guess, value chain, but it’s gonna take a little while, especially now that supply is dwindling. That’s a challenge, that makes it interesting. I’m not just selling stuff, I’m actually…I like to say we’re purveying a dream.
NA: Next, I asked Marie if she could share how they were planning to actually get farmers to raise carabaos that would produce top quality milk. Since the enterprise was created through Gawad Kalinga, were they hoping to tap into the network of those GK communities?
And she said that yes, absolutely. In fact, the overall plan is to get a number of students who were studying at the farm - kids who were under this thing called a SEED scholarship - to equip them with the training they needed to eventually run a whole network of little farms - like a collective or cooperative - or as Marie calls them, the “dairy yards”, kind of like a wine vineyard.
As clusters of these SEED students band together, and collectively work on improving and standardizing the quality of milk in their herds - that allows Marie, and by extension, all the farming collectives - to get that butter into the hands of more consumers and markets.
36:30 Working on products at the farm
MC: We’re starting up with a prototype here at the farm. So two kinds of education, and two kinds of training. Ultimately, these dairy yards will be run and owned by the SEED students, and also the GK communities that they serve. The vision is, they will be lead entrepreneurs, the GK communities and their surrounding areas would be their partners. A lot of it really is an internal change, where it’s really adjusting the poverty of the mind - which we do at Gawad Kalinga. The ability to dream, for them to claim their right to be rich, is how we call it. The right to the good things in life. Because if they’re going to be purveying something excellent, they should know what excellence is.
We’re now exploring a partnership with SGS, a multinational company. They want to come in and [help provide] training and certification for quality. Then with PCC, we have technical training, like a whole team of trainers to bring out the best, not just in the product but in people. Because then, people have ownership. Like I want everyone to have a sense of ownership.
37:45 On ownership and dignity
NA: That is your unique approach to it, from what I see, and what really excites me about sharing these kinds of stories with listeners is that, there are stories like these in the Philippines that are just incredibly humbling and heartwarming, because it’s such a different approach to building the business and your enterprise. It is going back to people who don’t have much right now, and giving them that sense of ownership, and the core of it being restoring the dignity of the people who work here. Even earlier, I was talking with Tita Tess, who does the peanut brittle. She was talking to me in Tagalog and we so had this casual conversation, and she was telling me about how some people approached her and said can we invest in you as the company. But she was saying that you know, I could have taken that…she said, “sa totoo lang, gusto ko na ako lang gagawa” (to tell the truth, I like that I do things myself) because she wants people to see that she can do it for herself, and that she can do that for her family, and build her business herself. Get her kids to help out, to show them, by example, that if you’re really dedicated to doing something, you can do it. And it really showed me that there’s a lot built into people that we kind of want to just tap into. I get the sense that that’s a big driver to what you’re doing.
39:10 Living with SEED students
MC: I’m so lucky to have this opportunity to live with them, and really get to know them on an intimate basis. I live with the SEED kids. I hear their dreams, and their fears. But their generosity of spirit, the love for their family, it’s like mind blowing. It’s heartbreaking. I mean, heartbreaking in a really good way, you know, because your heart is so full of love with the way they express it, and it just breaks because it can’t contain that love any more. For me, they’re so heroic in a lot of ways. That drives me. Like I want CalaBoo to succeed for them. This is theirs. I’m building it for them. It’s an honour to really see and be inspired by these kids who are so without malice. They’re not greedy, at all. If anything they will just give you what they have.
NA: And if you’ve listened to episode 9 of this podcast - you know, because I’ve talked about this at length - that these kids in this SEED program, are genuinely people who I look up to, myself. This next bit is my favourite part of the interview, and easily the thing that stayed with me long after I talked with Marie.
40:20 The most expensive thing they bought
MC: In one of my classes, I asked, what’s the most expensive thing you bought for yourself? They had to clarify it, because a lot of them would say, oh I bought this for my family, so I said no, for yourself. Two [students] stood up. One, because she said that she’s far from the library, and she really wanted to read this book. She even explained, I earned the money from tutoring, and I bought a calculus book.
The other one was, you know, most of my money goes to supporting my family, so paying for electricity, paying for water, paying for food. And the most expensive thing she bought was this pair of jeans, for 280 pesos. That’s what, like $4 or $5. I was like, it blew my mind. Both of them are actually part of the dairy team.
NA: A calculus book and a pair of jeans. Those are two of the most expensive things that these young, very bright and talented students bought for themselves. Like, a calculus book, that so many kids, including myself, totally took for granted, and you know, $5 for a pair of jeans - after paying her household’s electricity, rent, and food. I would have spent $5 for a coffee, not even thinking about it. These are the young people pushing boundaries in the Philippines.
42:10 "It grounds you"
NA: I’m tearing up right now, this has happened already so many times being here at the farm. It’s because…you don’t even have to live in the west, just in the city, like many of my friends who still live in Manila…you can grow up in this bubble, and it’s not until you get a chance to even just talk with people, it doesn’t even have to be long. Like yesterday, I was stuffing the Plush and Play animals [with a lola] and we were just sitting there, watching telenovelas. I guess because it’s sem(ester) break now, all the kids were at home, and they were making pancit, cooking lunch. And they offered me a plate, and I said “no, sige po, okay lang”, but they were very insistent so I accepted and said thank you po very much. Little things like that, those are things that really make an impact on you, when you visit these types of communities…that you take the time to listen and kinda like hang out with them, and just hear what they want to do, how life is like for them, because it really grounds you. And I guess, to kind of bring that back full circle - how grounding has this been for you, on a personal level? Coming from [your background] - were you in an executive marketing background, in the US?
43:45 Finding purpose
MC: I mean, it keeps it so real. It gives me the courage to ask, like you guys, you gotta buy this because it’s really good. And I don’t play that card, right - the “kawawa” card - but it gives me the courage to just go, because it’s not for me. And it’s a real thing. It’s so empowering, for me, to be able to help in real ways, not just by giving them money. I can actually help end poverty for a few people, in a very real way. But that’s why I get impatient, I want to things to be fast, let’s do it now. But to come up with a really amazing product, that chefs and restaurants and ideally, that Filipinos abroad can support and patronize, to really show the world. It’s grounding but it’s also at the same time, makes you want to dream, right? To reach for the heavens. You wanna just shoot for the stars. When I’m in Manila, I spend time with [chefs and restaurateurs] and talk to them, ask how can we bridge that and actually make something happen? It’s pretty cool.
My background is that, right, I worked on Pepsi and Disney and IKEA [campaigns] as a copywriter, in client services, and in product management. So it’s like wow, it all makes sense. All these years of toiling and climbing the corporate ladder and pursuing the American dream, is actually super beneficial here. So it’s grounding but at the same time, liberating and there’s a sense of freedom, and it’s almost like, yeah - I know why I’m here.
Talk about shooting for the stars, our butter now is actually being served at Amanpulo (Resorts). It’s so good that they serve it as butter pats. Not even as an ingredient. My dream is for the butter pat to mean something for all the places that produce it. To be like yeah, this is quality, this is what we have. When you go to a restaurant that has that, I’m in a world class restaurant.
WRAP-UP
My sincerest thanks to Marie Cavosora for meeting with me for this interview, which we recorded at the Gawad Kalinga Enchanted Farm. I am always floored by the people who take time to answer my questions, and in a general sense, with the energy, ability and realness they bring to the table Visit www.calaboo.com to find out more about their products, place an order, or find stockists in and around Manila. Pick up that butter when you can, I promise you’ll not regret it.
Music for the episode is by David Szestay, Eric and Magill, Podington Bear and Blue Dot Sessions. You can find their music on fma.org. Head over to exploringfilipinokitchens.com for past episodes, where you can check out the archives and listen to episodes by theme and topic discussed - would love to hear what you think! Please like the show on Facebook if you haven’t already, just search for Exploring Filipino Kitchens, and again, tell a fried - these stories are worth sharing.
Maraming salamat, and until next month - thank you for listening.