Moo!

The Ateneo John Gokongwei School of Management has a one-year program specifically focused on students with a strong entrepreneurial spirit. It is called the School of Management Business Accelerator Program, or SOMBA for short. At the end of the program, students must have developed a product, created a business plan which has been approved by a panel made up of recognized Filipino businessmen, established their company legally, and generated their projected revenue within a specified selling period. The SOMBA students held a two-day fair in the campus last week and I have to say that I was truly impressed with some of them. I'll be featuring some of their companies and products this week, beginning with one food product which I thought makes best use of a Filipino produce. Tropical Cow Mix & Dip tastes exactly like sweetened condensed milk but is made not of dairy milk but of coconut milk. Called gata in Tagalog, coconut milk comes from the meat of mature coconuts which is grated and squeezed through cheesecloth, and is a common cooking ingredient in the Philippines and in other Southeast Asian countries. For lactose-intolerant people like me, Tropical Cow's Mix & Dip is the perfect condensed milk substitute, and I hope that they can develop other milk substitute products out of coconut milk. I think Tropical Cow's logo (on the screen and on top of the refrigerator)—a typical image of a tropical drink served in a half coconut shell but with an udder—is hilarious, and isn't their mascot (on their t-shirts) just so cute?



Tropical Cow Manufacturing, Inc. can be reached by emailing tropicalcow@gmail.com. The Vice President for Operations is Joey Nocom and his email address is joeynocom@gmail.com. They have a website and can also be found in Facebook.