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Billing for your organic store in Tamil Nadu

Millets by the hundred grams, oil by the bottle and the weekly box, each at its own rate.

Green shelving stacked with jars, bottles and packets of natural foods in a shop
Green shelving stacked with jars, bottles and packets of natural foods in a shop Photo: Thamizhpparithi Maari, CC BY-SA 3.0

Tools for millets, pressed oils, palm jaggery and the weekly box

  • Bills on your phone

    A bill sent on WhatsApp to the family whose Saturday box is collected by a neighbour, so the one who collects can see what the box held and what was charged.

  • Orders to suppliers

    An order to a farmer or a farmers' group from your phone, with its date and what you asked for, so the season's lots can be matched to what you owe.

  • Your own online shop

    A page listing the millets, pressed oils and jaggery you hold today with their rates, so a family can check before it makes the trip.

  • Offers for regular customers

    For the family that has bought one farm's rice for many months, a discount on that rice only, with the farm's name on the same bill line.

  • Low stock warnings

    A warning when a flour sack runs low, so you order a fresh small lot instead of topping up the old one.

A hand holding up a round cake of dark palm jaggery
A hand holding up a round cake of dark palm jaggery Photo: த.உழவன், CC BY-SA 3.0

The farm districts that feed a Tamil Nadu organic shelf

Organic goods come from the farm districts, and a few Tamil Nadu districts show what is grown there.

  • Viluppuram is called the sugar bowl of Tamil Nadu, and its sugarcane supplies all the cane for 7 sugar mills in the district, which makes jaggery a natural thing to ask for from there.
  • In Salem, the Malgoa mango is the pride of the district, and tapioca, grown widely and used mainly to make starch, is another major crop.
  • Chennai's Koyambedu Wholesale Market Complex has 3,194 shops for perishables on 295 acres, and an organic shop in the city sets its fresh prices against what that yard charges.

A farmer's page kept like a supplier's, millets for the mess and the home at their own units and a weekly box billed the same way each time

  • A late lot is paid at its own day and weight

    A rice lot that came late and a lot from the last harvest are not the same rice, and they are not worth the same on the shelf. At the season's end each lot is paid at its own day and weight, and nobody argues which came when. The farmer whose lot came late knows it was counted by its own day.

  • Millets by the sack for the hostel mess, by the hundred grams for the home

    A hostel mess takes millet by the sack and a family takes it by the hundred grams. The mess wants one bill for the whole sack and a rate it can plan its month on, and the family wants a small packet it can carry home.

  • The weekly box billed the same way every time

    Put the box together once as an item, with its price, and bill it again each week for the families that take it. The report counts the boxes that went, and you know how much millet and oil to bring in for the coming Saturdays.

Open sacks of pulses, flour and dried red chillies lined up at a market shop in Ooty, Tamil Nadu
Open sacks of pulses, flour and dried red chillies lined up at a market shop in Ooty, Tamil Nadu Photo: Timothy A. Gonsalves, CC BY-SA 4.0
Rows of green vegetable crops on a hill farm with mountains behind, at Akoni in the Nilgiris
Rows of green vegetable crops on a hill farm with mountains behind, at Akoni in the Nilgiris Photo: Timothy A. Gonsalves, CC BY-SA 4.0

A late harvest, traditional rice in sacks that look alike and a weekly box nobody wrote down

  1. A late harvest and a bare millet sack

    After a dry spell a farmer's millet harvest comes a month late, and the shop has no millet in the very weeks the festival buyers arrive. You tell each customer the same story, they go away, and some do not come back.

  2. Traditional rice in sacks that look alike

    Mapillai samba, karuppu kavuni and seeraga samba sit in sacks that look much alike, and their rates differ a good deal from one kind to the next. The scoop moves from one sack to another, the chalk label rubs off, and a customer is charged for the dearer rice while the cheaper one is scooped. At the month's end the stock of each kind does not match what its sack holds.

  3. The weekly box that lives on a customer's word

    A family takes the same box every Saturday: a kilo of millet, a bottle of oil, some greens. The shop remembers the order, until the person who remembers is away, and then the box is wrong or not packed.

Women's groups with produce who moved from fairs to one place for orders

Swateja Mart in Maharashtra works with women's self-help groups. Paper bills and stock lists, and sales at fairs and weekly markets, gave way to orders, bills and stock in one place on Bharatrath.

Questions Tamil Nadu organic store owners ask about farmers, oils and boxes

The weekly box holds millets one month and pulses the next. Is it the same item?

Name the month's contents in the box's item, millet box or pulse box, so the count of each box stays true and the daily report shows which box the families took.

Customers ask whether the rice is this year's harvest or last year's. Where do I write it?

Write the harvest year in the rice's item, for example mapillai samba, this year's harvest. The old sack and the new sack then have their own counts, and the bill tells the customer which she bought.

Karuppu kavuni, mapillai samba and seeraga samba sacks look alike. How do I keep them apart?

Make each rice its own item, named in full. The sack's count then falls under the right name when the bill is made, even when the three sacks stand side by side.

More questions every shop asks

Organic farming in Tamil Nadu: a policy and a Chennai market

In March 2023 Tamil Nadu unveiled an Organic Farming Policy to support chemical-free farming and supply safe food. The shops that sell what such farms grow are the ones who have to show where it came from.

In January 2024 a state agriculture department market at Semmozhi Poonga, Chennai, was reported to sell specially grown vegetables bought directly from farmers. A private organic shop in the same city has to give its customers a reason to choose it over that market.