Creating local business with Mimi Moto
Mimi Moto believes that you only can grow and scale your business based on fair profit and working together with local entrepreneurs. Most important – these local businesspeople should be able to make a healthy profit. The Mimi Moto cookstove ‘is just a tool’ which will be sold once per 4 to 5 years. The recurring revenue will be generated by the local production and sale of the required fuel.
This principle is explained in this video.
Tool & Fuel Philosophy
The Tool and Fuel philosophy is about combining an efficient and reliable Tool and a high-quality sustainable Fuel. This combination creates a Local, Sustainable and Profitable Business.
Tool
The high efficiency of Mimi Moto makes that cooking requires up to 90% less biomass compared to cooking with wood or charcoal. This efficiency lowers the daily fuel cost for households significantly.
Fuel
Pellets as cooking fuel creates a new local fuel market. Pellet fuel produced from local biomass waste streams are cheaper than traditional fuels as well as other modern fuels and generates a healthy margin for the local producer.
Fuel Challenges
Wood and charcoal are the main fuels for 2.6 billion people globally. Especially in peri-urban/urban areas, these fuels are becoming more expensive due to rapid deforestation, government laws and population growth. Clean modern fuels such as LPG and Electricity are available but expensive and lack of distribution infrastructure make it unavailable for a large part of the population.
Wood
Unhealthy
Deforestation
Time intensive
Charcoal
Expensive
Inefficient production process
Unhealthy
Deforestation
LPG
Expensive
Infrastructure required
Fossil fuel
Not sustainable
Electricity
Expensive
Infrastructure required
Unstable
High upfront cost
Fuel Opportunities
Mimi Moto uses pellets as fuel. These pellets can be produced locally from various biomass waste streams. The biomass suitable for making pellets usually have little value and are discarded or burned. A pellet machine is used for the production of pellets. Depending on the used biomass type, additional size reduction and drying is required.
Pellets
Pellets offer the opportunity to convert cheap locally available waste products into a valuable locally produced fuel. The pellet making process is very efficient because 1kg of dry biomass converts to 1kg of pellets with minimal losses. To produce 1kg of charcoal 8 to 12 times more biomass is needed. Types of biomass and agricultural waste which can be used for pellet production are sawdust, coffee husk, rice husk, groundnut shells and sugarcane bagasse. Macadamia, coconut and palm kernel shells can be used directly as fuel for Mimi Moto without pelletizing.
Customers can save around 30% to 50% on their monthly fuel bill compared to charcoal and LPG. The combination of a Mimi Moto and pellets makes that 85% less biomass is needed for cooking.
Business support
Mimi Moto believes that you only can grow and scale your business based on fair profit and working together with local entrepreneurs. Therefore, we not only sell cookstoves but also want to help entrepreneurs to start their clean cooking business.
We will share our ‘lessons learned’ of the last 7-years. Specifically, we have a check list which contains all the criteria to judge if the local business environment is suitable to start clean cooking business. Mimi Moto also has business case formats available for making financial plans. Based on the business plan and track record of the entrepreneur, we want to discuss how we can support further in starting and growing the local business.
