The cassava cakes of Ronalyn Dignos are now popular among patrons that it has already reached the shores of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia whenever vacationing neighbors from abroad are around and would order by the dozen to bring as “pasalubongs”.
“Learning has no end”. This is what drives the cassava cake supplier Ronalyn Dignos of Manolo Fortich Bukidnon to continue attending training programs and search for innovations in her cooking. Her latest innovation is her chocolate cassava cake of Psaltina Food Products.
Ronalyn is a graduate of the first batch of the Training on Farm Business School conducted by ATI-RTC X in Manolo Fortich last November 2015. She immediately started cooking cassava cake with an oven she bought out of her slot from the “hulugan or paluwagan”. Cooking at first without experience was an ordeal for Ronalyn. She spends a whole day practicing and tasting to be able to get the right result. “Sometimes I wake up at night and can’t go back to sleep, so I have to cook again to practice”, she said.
It is said that in business one has to experience failure within the first five years. Ronalyn got her share of this when she bought a different type of cassava as raw materials. This resulted to a different taste and texture of her cassava cake. That was in December 2015 when she had to throw away the 40 boxes of her cassava cake, and struggled to explain it well to her customer. It’s better to lose some amount than to losing your credibility and your customer, she said.
That incident was a big revelation for Ronalyn and her husband. She thought, it is very important that we should have enough supply of cassava, which is sure to be of good quality. And the only way to ensure that is to plant their cassava. That started their plantation that is now the source of continuous supply of their raw materials.
In her three years of the business, Ronalyn has now five student resellers and three resellers in neighbouring municipalities, with a demand of at least 100 boxes of cassava cake every week, on regular days. This gives her a net income of four thousand every week! That excludes her income during fiestas, christmas and new year days, birthdays, christening, during wakes or vigils and other special occasions.
With the support of her husband, they are able to send their daughter to a prestigious private university in Cagayan de Oro City. Yet with everyday income coming in to the family, Ronalyn continues to learn to improve her product, and still searching for more projects to invest into.