Davao Diaries: April 8, 2025

Shubhrendu Khoche • April 8, 2025

Coin-operated hot and cold water dispenser

What is common to bottled water, spices and condiments, Butane gas and gasoline?

1. Sachetization of consumption is everywhere in small cities.

Some of the big cans of water that small businesses buy on the yufin B2B commerce platform end up on coin operated water dispensers. Will ask the owner next time whether she can configure the prices depending on the daily weather.
Do you get piped cooking gas at home? Or order a gas cylinder that lasts a month? Many households in small cities in the Philippines depend on refillable Butane gas cans that fit directly into a small gas stove.
Even the spices and condiments that small businesses procure from yufin get sold as a small plastic pouch that serves half a week.
2. Digital payments acceptance and downstream services are not the immediate pain points that small businesses are solving for this week. First, they need tools to grow their income and have more ‘cash on hand’ to be able to bank it or adopt digital payments.
A good way to increase their income is embedded financing for productive procurement of stocks. And to do embedded financing, you have to be embedded in their daily flows. This is why yuOrder, yuSell and yuMall came before yuCredit. But more on yuCredit next month!

3. One can get the ranking of the best-selling brands of rice from the yufin wholesaler dashboard. But you can also guess which rice is selling more by glancing at garbage bags. But after a few cycles, these rice sacks themselves become plastic waste.

4. Supply chains need to do a lot more for sustainable, reusable and biodegradable packaging that is both affordable and non-polluting.
One of the dense clusters of yufin merchants is in a coastal township where the means of livelihood have changed from fishing and diving for pearls to working at the nearby port. The entire township is literally drowning in plastic waste. All houses are built on stilts in the old, traditional style and the plastic waste just keeps accumulating under these stilts.
As our commerce GTV grows, we will do our part to sensitize both small businesses and our partner wholesalers on this. But for now, it comes down to the heroics of local volunteers to continually clear out feets of plastic bottles, wrappers and sacks.