Just over a year ago we started our Good Jamu journey in the Netherlands. It has been an amazing experience so far and it is so uplifting to see how many people want to add a drink based on a traditional Indonesian recipe to their daily ritual.
When you start a business, you want to do everything right and make the biggest impact. Why else would you set up a business? Good Jamu is 100% plant-based, so it was natural for us to put sustainability high on our agenda. We initially came up with the idea of using glass bottles and setting up a deposit return system, meaning customers could return their glass bottles to us for reuse, as a way of achieving our goal of operating sustainably.
When Good Jamu became a company, we were in the middle of summer and the self-delivery of the orders by bicycle seemed to be going quite well. A nice thought, because soon several orders came in from all over the country! Although this was good news, we immediately started looking for a logistics partner to help us. Only every company we contacted indicated that we were not big enough to supply through them and that they could not return the empty bottles to us. We decided to buy a small car and deliver all orders ourselves. In one year we have driven about 70,000 km! We visited places we had never heard of and even got a chance to meet many of our clients.
We learned so much managing the deliveries. For example, we learned that the deposit system was a good idea on paper, but unfortunately was not sustainable in practice due to the number of kilometers we collected. As a result, we have decided to end the deposit system (for now). The Good Jamu community responded positively to this change and we continue to introduce jamu to more and more people as we grow.
One day we received a message from Fietskoerier in Deventer that they could deliver for us! This was great news as it would save us so much time, miles and emissions. It meant we could leave all the logistics to the experts and focus on expanding Good Jamu's reach and telling our story.
We started with temporary boxes to test if the bottles would travel well in a bike box, and now we finally have sturdy boxes with our own branding.
We're so lucky to have found a reliable, sustainable partner in Fietskoerier Deventer, but there's still so much work to do. We're constantly looking for ways to improve our service, products and partnerships. When it comes to running a business, there's always room for improvement.
