Hooray for our SMEs!

It is always heartening to hear about successful endeavors by our micro, small and medium entrepreneurs.  We come across success stories of these entrepreneurs, and many of them started out innocuously, but all of them were driven by dreams of success, moderate they may be.

If you are a habitué of 7-11 or Family Mart, for instance, you would have noticed those brightly-packaged boxes of polvoron, Pinoy products that are now slowly invading supermarket and convenience store shelves.  These are not ordinary polvorons — as their tag line says, they are “polvoron like no other”. Our good old polvoron, the quintessential pasalubong of outbound Pinoys, now comes coated in chocolate.  That is how Chocovron came about from its initial conception, though now they come in so many varied flavors it is hard to keep up with the manufacturers. But that is getting ahead of the story.

Joel Yala and his wife Marissa were ordinary employees — the wife worked in a garments factory while he worked at Amcor in Alabang for 12 years before the bug got to him. Tagging along with his wife on her weekly trips to the supermarket, they noted with interest the different chocolate-covered biscuits and marshmallows, all locally-produced. The packaging must have been interesting enough for them to take notice, and this they filed away in their memory banks for future reference.  Earlier on, after more than 10 years of employment, Joel was increasingly restless. Was going the OFW route the only way to achieve financial independence?  He refused that option, but instead he challenged himself to have an established business before he reached his 40th birthday. Looking at the different chocolate-covered treats on the shelves, both Joel and his wife wondered:  is this the answer to their dreams?

That was in 2003, and Joel took the quantum leap by resigning from his full-time job of 12 years, with no background on food manufacturing or marketing to back him up.  Instead, he relied on his practical sense and a dogged determination to carve his own business. Striking out on their own, Joel and Marissa chose the very Filipino polvoron, experimented and tested their product until they could come up with a polvoron that would not easily crumble under the chocolate cover. When the product was finally perfected, Joel studied his market and came out with Chocovron, a single proprietor business in 2003 operating from their modest house which measured 30 square meters. With no employees other than the two of them, they made and sold 10 packs/day.

In 2004, they were able to hook up with different government agencies, foremost among them the Dept. of Trade & Industry (DTI), the Dept. of Agriculture, and the Dept. of Science & Technology (DOST).  CITEM, an agency attached to DTI challenged them to have their unique and all-Filipino product marketed widely by joining their exhibits, giving them incentives like a 50-percent discount on exhibitor’s fees. The couple boldly accepted the challenge and got their first public exposure. In that same year, DOST provided them with technical support by giving them their first machine and evaluating the potential of their product. From their strictly manual operations, they could now move on with better production outputs.

Joel has always recognized the big help that these government agencies played in their success story. After joining their first exhibit, DTI next challenged them to improve their packaging, and Joel is not one to let constructive advice pass him by. Humbly, he said “para din naman po sa akin yun eh.”  With DTI’s guidance, and with his own keen eye on food products, he improved his packaging to the present one, the ones that we now see in SM stores, 7-11, Family Mart, All-Day Convenience Stores, Duty Free and even Gourdo’s, the specialty store.

By 2011 he converted his business from a single proprietorship to a corporation, and in 2012, he was ready for the foreign market.  He heeded DTI’s call for him to join the Philippine Pavilion in a trade show in New Jersey, U.S.A. with his Chocovron along with other Filipino food products. He has since joined other trade exhibits in Hong Kong, China and Thailand, all through the invitation and with the support of the Department of Trade & Industry. In all his travels abroad, his eyes roved the shelves of supermarkets, buying three or four products whose packaging has caught his attention. He knew, from his inspiring talks with DTI that packaging spelled a big difference in marketing, could in fact spell the difference between a doomed product and one deftly picked out from shelves by curious shoppers. He never scrimped on his packaging development costs, he proudly declares.

Advertising, though it is widely accepted by many as a necessary tool of marketing, can be very costly.  Knowing that their modest product is still in its baby years, this would not have been an option, but the stubborn streak in Joel found another solution, a much cheaper one.  â€œWhy not go into walking advertisement?” With a simple design that said “I Love Chocovron”, he gave away his colorful t-shirts so that many more would learn of Chocovron.

A few years ago, the Yalas rented a much bigger space at 150 sq. meters.  Now, their operations are housed in a 650 sq. meter office, and from a two-man operation, they now have 45 regular employees.  They have also cultivated and developed their dealerships across the country.  Their distribution network, helped vastly by their free door-to-door delivery service ranges from the Ilocos region in the north all the way to Mindanao in the south, “pero hanggang pier lang po.”

From a simple chocolate-covered polvoron, they have also developed other flavors and variants.  There is the Snack-Rite polvoron sticks, the trendy cookies ‘n’ cream, the very Pinoy pinipig, durian, cashew, ube, and pandan flavored polvoron.  They studied the market for healthy options in keeping with the trend and have come up with dark chocolate sugar-free pinipig, the coconut cream bar using virgin coconut oil, the ampalaya and malunggay no- sugar variant using Stevia, a plant-based sweetener. The high-end variants sell at P135 for pack of 12 with other variants selling at P105.

We at B&L salute the Filipino entrepreneur, the SMEs that form the backbone of Philippine economy like Joel Yala and hope that inspiring stories such as this would motivate others to follow suit.

Mabuhay!!! Be proud to be a Filipino.

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