Deliverable achievement report - Deliverable 6.1.3 - Business Plans report - Updated

This deliverable, which benefits from the contribution of all partners, benefits from the results obtained in several other tasks, developed along all the supply chain: from variety selection to field management, from the assessment of agronomic yields to that of processing yields, from the recovery and improvement of traditional recipes and the definition of their nutritional features, to market analysis and marketing planning, from cost structure and pricing analysis to potential profit evaluation. The challenge has been to enable cooperatives to capitalise the consumer’s willingness to pay for higher quality products - mountain products, obtained by agroecological techniques, with a relevant social value (made by women cooperatives pursuing the empowering of women and young people) and good nutritional properties – by developing consistent and feasible business models, based not only on consumers surveys and desk analyses, but also on evaluation made by means of field tests, thanks to opportunities made available by the MountainHER project, such as open days and restaurant events. The analysis shows that the incorporation of a processing activity within the Mountain Female Cooperatives’ area of activity allows the possibility to develop a higher added valued, to be shared with farmers, according to different payment models. Of course, analyses can differ according to the different products’ recipes: some of the tested products have simple recipes, with few ingredients and therefore a simpler raw material cost structure, whereas other products’ cost structure complexity is linked to the higher complexity of the recipe. Consumers’ decisions to regularly purchase a product, as the different performed analyses have shown, depend on multiple variables, therefore strategic business management and marketing decisions need to be based on continuous analyses and adjustments. This is why the MountainHER project business planning went beyond calculations, but chose to contribute to the Cooperatives’ know-how in business modeling and strategic thinking, also for the sake of the maximum level of reproducibility of the project.