Jade Fernandez

We’re working with Jude, a crab farmer in Davao on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, to help him figure out how to scale his business. We traveled there to observe the current business. A lot of their procedures run like an assembly line, so we were tasked with figuring out where the bottlenecks were and what could be improved. At the end of two quarters, we rolled out three different products that could help. The first is a business model, to help them better track their output and input, and reduce risk in the overall business. The second product is a ramp-like structure that will help make the process of inspecting for soft-shell crabs less time-consuming and labor-intensive. The third is a new crab cage. The current cages are not stackable and require a lot of effort to put crabs through hand-sewn nets that act as lids for the cages. I tried doing this when I was visiting, and it was just so hard because the crab was trying to pinch you and trying to pinch the net. The new cage has a lid on top that can be easily opened and closed and is also white instead of green to make it easier to see the crabs.