Paloma Alba Herrera
Daniela Borrego
Antonio Batarse
Universidad de Monterrey
Blanca Camargo
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Chicza is the first organic, totally natural and biodegradable chewing gum produced in a sustainable way from the chicozapote trees in the Mayan rainforest by a consortium of indigenous chicleros (gum extractors) that directly benefit from the fair trade of the gum.
This is a business model that alleviates poverty and generates social benefits to indigenous Maya gum harvesters by producing 100% organic chewing gum.
After 100 years of extracting raw material for others they started wondering what else they could do to improve their situation. They decided to make chewing gum themselves and start selling it, which would need a solid business plan. During the first six years they built a whole business scheme, financial systems, methods of sales collection, distribution, payments, etc. Then product development and market development. The difference between Chicza and other social enterprises is that, from the outset, the task was to set up a business structure, vertical or horizontal, based on professional systems. Discipline is the first fundamental element, Mr. Aldrete said. So it is not only the product but also the business model which is innovative because it broke paradigms: Chicza is a cooperative, a corporation, and a development agency at the same time. They produce the chewing gum in the Maya rainforest in Mexico with a commercial platform in England, and an affiliate marketing company in Europe, which receives the product and distributes it. Chicza generates profits that go directly to its members (chicleros) and to an incubation strategy to generate new economic units with new products to the market.
Manuel Aldrete, Chicza's Executive Director, told us that when Chicza was developed, there were difficult processes that required specialization and professional production, because organic chewing gum can't contain solvents, stabilizers, artificial flavors, or any chemical ingredients like conventional chewing gum. When they developed this product they were worried about which market they could target, so they entered the gourmet consumer market.
Mr. Manuel Aldrete is dedicated to the business and the environmental aspects. He is the son of an entrepreneur, a sociologist with a specialization in accounting, and with knowledge of commercial law. The most important thing of his life was to have worked with his father, a businessman who was one of those men of the old school who instead of giving money to his children, put them to work and that's how he assumed the work culture. For him, having assumed the work culture from a very young age, having a responsibility, having resources and knowing how to manage them, learning to invest and learning to live well with the result of his work has been very helpful.
He was very interested in rural sociology and the agrarian matter. At the age of 24, he already had the post of subdelegate and devoted himself to the matter of economic organization of the countryside and economic units of production. A little more than 20 years ago there was a great crisis of chewing gum in the Peninsula of Yucatan, a great crisis was because gum companies were decentralized and they started to sell or close. The governor of Quintana Roo (the state were Chicza is produced) at that time hired Manuel Aldrete to solve the issue of the chicle activity. Mr. Aldrete established three strategies:
1. Put people to work because people who do not work begin to generate conflict.
2. Establish a formal company because if you didn't make a company, that wasn't going to work.
3. The last element, keep your hands out of this, he said.
Having finished the planning work, he asked people to be associates because if they weren't going to be partners the enterprise would not work. He mentioned an economist and sociologist who said that social enterprises such as cooperatives or community companies had to have an organic integration between professionals and producers. Chicza rescued already-established but not functioning community cooperatives and formed a larger cooperative that works as an integrator and a coordinator. The solidarity character, the collective nature is not lost, but it works as a portfolio of services where the main cooperative does not own anything, it only owns the services it provides to its partners. He is currently director of this great regional cooperative of chicleros which comprises 36 operating local cooperatives (from 42 registered) that gives work to more than 1,500 chicleros a year.
The impact that the Chicza gum makes is not only to the chicleros, through a stable source income and a better quality of life, but to the forest where they get the gum from because they respect the natural life cycle of the trees. The tropical zone of Mexico is the only lung that gives us the oxygen that we need and if we start building in this area the sunrays will get past and we will start getting ultraviolet rays. Chicza is trying to keep this forest by supporting the people who live there and giving back to it so the forests keep on being the lung of the world and we can all live well and breathe clean air. Manuel Adrete told us that they want Chicza to be inclusive and incorporate women into the business and make gender barriers disappear so that women, especially indigenous women, can become a part of the business world.
He also says that globalization is a demon, but there is nothing stronger than globalization that identity. He does not sell chewing gum, he sells the story behind it. Chicza sells the story of the trees that only exist in the Mexican tropic, and part of Guatemala, if they don’t sell this, they lose their identity.
The only difference that Chicza has with a private company is how the income is distributed, what is done with the profits, that is the fundamental part. In Chicza, no one keeps the net profit, it is redistributed among the generating cooperative. He quoted Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize in economics, who said that the future of economics in capitalism is the cooperative model. So this company was built like this.
He told us that a chiclero wins 11,000 Mexican pesos per month in the season of chewing gum. Mr. Aldrate tells the chicleros, "My friend, if you want better price have better product." There is no doubt that to sell a high-quality product you have to be efficient and competitive, because if not, you will not succeed.
It seems like the business world is a cold world but it depends on how you deal with it. In September 2016, the WTO invited Mr. Manuel to the inaugural assembly to talk about inclusive markets, he calls them excluded markets, because there are no mechanisms that include people with fewer resources. "The WTO invited me to demonstrate that the problem is not the markets, that the problem is the capacity, that people with fewer resources can also participate in the market." In his presentation he exhibited only a photo of a chiclero above a tree with the jungle background and his speech began by saying, “See that man up there? That man is representing, not poverty, is representing the pride of being a chiclero, the guardian of the jungle, is representing the man committed, competent, competitive, the man who is responsible for the oxygen that all of us here are consuming." Chicza is a social enterprise that in 20 years hasn't had a single conflict with its workers thanks to the mechanism that manages systems responsibility.
He tells us that the environment and business are possible, as long as a product is made in a sustainable way, in his case, a product that doesn't damage the forest. The cooperative has rescued 4,000 hectares that were agricultural land and turned them to forest. In four or five years they have invested more than 40 million pesos in rescuing the forest.
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Manuel Aldrete Terrazas, Sociologist
