Project collaborators of the Pilot Testing of the Village Level Coconut Water Processing System assessed the feasibility of the village-level coconut water processing facility in a meeting held on August 4, 2016 at the Department of Agriculture Regional Field Office V (DA RFO V) in Pili, Camarines Sur.

In the said meeting, the research team from Central Bicol State University of Agriculture (CBSUA) headed by Project Leader Hanilyn Hidalgo discussed the results of the comprehensive feasibility study on coco water as well as their response and actions taken on the comments by the PRDP regional office and the Project Support Office. Present during the meeting were representatives of the project collaborators from PRDP South Luzon, DA RFO V, and the Philippine Center for Postharvest Development and Mechanization (PhilMech).

Results of the performance evaluation of the coco water facility conducted by the CBSUA team shows that eight-hour operation of the facility can process 1,431 mature coconuts and produce 1,490 bottled coconut water. In addition, the facility has a system capacity of 56.2 liters per hour and an efficiency of 89.20 percent. Meanwhile, sensory evaluation of the coco water indicates that the product is highly acceptable by various types of consumers including students, athletes, professionals and household respondents. Physicochemical and nutritional analysis of coco water reveals that its source relative to the production schedule did not significantly affect pasteurized coco water’s physicochemical characteristics. Based from the nutritional analysis, pasteurized coco water has the least caloric content but contains higher amount of minerals like sodium, potassium and calcium compared with two popular beverage brands in the country.

Likewise, findings of the market and profitability study, particularly the price sensitivity analysis, show that the range of acceptable prices for pasteurized coco water was between P12 and P24. Proposed profitable price of a 330 ml bottle of coco water is P17 while suggested retail price is P20.

CBSUA calculated the investment requirement for a village-level coco water processing facility at over P4 million and the product’s shelf life to be only eight days. The product’s unique selling point is focused on substituting water as the top beverage thus the advertising slogan, “It’s more than just water! It’s coco water.”

PRDP South Luzon Director Shandy M. Hubilla said that the bottomline of the research and development project is to enable coconut farmers to commercialize and adopt the village level coconut water processing system. He said that this can be done using the results of CBSUA’s feasibility studies in developing future PRDP agro-industrial enterprise development (I-REAP) sub-projects. However, the project team is yet to address some challenges which include finding the right balance between the need to produce more and job generation, how to prolong the product’s shelf-life, and reducing the production and investment costs. CBSUA will incorporate the project collaborators’ recommendations in their final terminal report to be submitted in mid-August 2016.

The Pilot Testing of the Village Level Coconut Water Processing System is being implemented under PRDP I-REAP 3.2, a sub-component of the Project’s agro-industrial enterprise development component. The project, which commenced in May 2015 is a collaborative undertaking among the DA-PRDP, PhilMech, DA RFO V, CBSUA and the provincial local government unit of Camarines Sur. (Annielyn L. Baleza, DA-PRDP RPCO V InfoACE Unit)