Kickstarter

Recognize that Kickstarter campaigns are all-or-nothing. If the Afghan Pepper Company does not reach its goal, the project gets none of its pledges. Also... every penny of every pledge will go to funding this project.

The idea you are about to back is going to change the world.

You clicking that green button on the right leads to the creation of a legal value chain in Afghanistan making a high-quality, proprietary product for a stable, global market. Farmers grow produce other than opium poppy, demand for barrels and bottles and safe transportation rises, food processing expands, jobs are created, stability ensues, governments are supported by the governed, troops come home. All that and the world has a new, very delicious hot sauce to enjoy.

Please spread the word about this project. Tell as many people as you can.

First Principles

1. Human beings should have the opportunity to live in peace and have the freedom to pursue a productive livelihood.
2. Productive endeavors require consumers.

The Afghan Pepper Company

Calling all interested Afghan farmers: The Afghan Pepper Company wants to buy peppers.

And, once we fully operationalize our business, we’ll need Afghan food processors, bottlers, packagers and distributors to make, bottle and ship our product. We’ll also need several other agricultural products in order to make our Afghan Pepper Company Hot Sauce. But that’s step three. Right now, this Kickstarter campaign is funding our company’s second step.

The Afghan Pepper Company has perfected its Hot Sauce recipe - that was step one. Step two is to produce its hot sauce on a commercial scale in a licensed kitchen and sell it according to laws governing such matters. Once we get the requisite backing here, we will buy bulk quantities of our ingredients and barrels, bottles, labels, tools and supplies; rent our commercial kitchen space, mix up our secret recipe, let it age (this is important) and then send you your rewards.

Once we have the experience of making our Afghan Pepper Company Hot Sauce commercially here in the US and the wherewithal to identify our own best practices, we will be off to Afghanistan to establish the value chain where we will source the ingredients locally from sustainability-minded farmers, process and make the sauce in environmentally-friendly ways, and package and ship our product to markets around the world; buying carbon offsets whenever our suppliers should but don’t or can’t.

None of this will be possible without your help.

Second Principles

War sucks. Afghans don’t deserve a continuation of the decimation of their country and neither do other nations’ military troops deserve to fight and die there. I am all for international aid - without it, the Afghan Pepper Company would never be able to operate where it wants to - but I also believe there is a market opportunity to help individual Afghans pursue productive livelihoods on their own terms. 

The Afghan Pepper Company is buying peppers. You don’t have to grow them, you don’t have to farm at all. But my company is buying them. We are buying several other crops, too. We are buying bottles. We are buying transportation. Who is selling?

No government has ever controlled all of present-day Afghanistan. Ever. I don’t know that it can be done. Personally, I also don’t know how to fight a war. I don’t know how to end a war. I don’t know how to convince the parties in Afghanistan that I perceive to be in the wrong that they are in the wrong. I can’t even convince my own relatives at Thanksgiving dinner that their political ideas are wrong. I don’t know how to rebuild a nation. I don’t pretend to know. But I do know markets and I know that people typically want to make an honest living trading goods and services with other honest people.

The Afghan Pepper Company is not imperialist, cultural or otherwise. I believe individuals strive for peace and freedom and, from time to time, they are willing to give up one for the other. I don’t have prescriptions for how to balance the two, or advice on how to live or any of the rest. My company is buying peppers. This simple act can and will change the discussion and change the world.

The Marketplace

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. He’ll eat fish. For a lifetime. Ummm... yum?

How about: build a fish market, buy the fisherman’s catch so he can focus on his fishing skill and buy his bread from the baker; sell the fish fillets to the baker and candlestick maker; ferment the fish head and tail with some soybeans to make fish sauce. Bottle the sauce. Sell that, too.

One does not have to be both producer and consumer of one’s own livelihood. This is the idea of the productive livelihood: be a fisherman, but do it in an environment that values fish. Maybe in an environment that values fish more than, say, heroin. And, of course, steer your fishing boat away from all the mines placed in your harbor during decades of war.

Afghanistan needs value chains. Agriculture is one link: farmers growing food and bringing it to market. Add to that the links of food processing and bottling and shipping. All of these links have been decimated by decades of war. There are plenty of development professionals in Afghanistan trying to help rebuild this infrastructure. The Afghan Pepper Company will be there to buy and hire - we are the missing link in the chain.

Charity gives a person a fish. Aid teaches a person to fish. But then you need sellers and buyers - fishermen and fish markets - for sustainable existence.

If you’re still not sure how our company is going to change the world by creating this market, here are two resources for you: The first is this link to a Ted talk by Ashraf Ghani, former Afghanistan Finance Minister and 2009 presidential candidate. If you don’t have time to watch it all, Mr. Ghani answers some questions about Afghanistan around 14 minutes and 30 seconds that I take to heart. What he says about private investment and global access aligns perfectly with the Afghan Pepper Company’s market solution thesis. Combine his message with this Oxfam report from 2008 and it is clear that the Afghan Pepper Company is in the right place to fulfill its mission.

Company History

In 2007, I was gung-ho to get a futures market started in Afghanistan. So were  some other people. From what I had heard, the only crop in Afghanistan for which farmers could receive futures-type benefits was opium poppy. “What if,” I thought, “instead of giving out wheat seed like the standard development model dictates, one asks an Afghan farmer what he wants to grow? And then what if you paid the farmer today for delivery of that crop in the future? This could work.” The problem, I was told, gets to the “peace” side of our first principles: what good is getting paid today to grow a crop that isn’t poppy if you get shot for it? So, yeah. There was that.

Assuming that the situation in Afghanistan would improve to the point where a futures market would be possible, I started a series of culinary experiments. It’s all fine and well to buy Afghan produce, but I would then have to sell it or make something out of it that I could sell. Condiments and chutneys made of pomegranates and muskmelon; dried spices with grapes and raisins - I tried everything I could think of and combined everything I could find. All my experiments were conducted with produce and products from Pakistan and Azerbijan and other nearby countries based on research into what was still being grown in Afghanistan’s decimated farmland. This was in 2007 - 2009 and at the time it was cheaper to ship something to-and-from China three times than to get anything from Afghanistan to the US. Transportation is still pretty pricey but it is getting better.

Through all my recipes, the only shelf-stable and positively delicious product I came up with (all my other concoctions were either one, the other or neither) was my Afghan Pepper Company Hot Sauce. I made the first batch of this in 2010 and it was ready in early 2011. Tasting it, I immediately started aging a second batch (in April) to make sure it wasn’t a fluke of deliciousness. Based on what I’m tasting today, it was no fluke. This Hot Sauce is the real deal. It is awesome.

And then I realized: so what if there is no futures market in Afghanistan yet? A market is a market: it requires buyers and sellers. Let’s just go buy; let’s help the markets there crawl before they walk. Aid dollars are being spent like crazy and if we don’t help install some level of buyers for Afghan goods, it will all be for naught. Recall Mr. Ghani’s belief that $1 in private investment equals $20 in aid - that aid money comes right out of your federal taxes. And you can add military spending on top of that. We must stabilize the situation. This Kickstarter campaign aids in that process.

The Kickstarter Campaign

I am not just trying to make this idea a reality, I am very sincerely trying to change the world. I have set my funding goal at $25,000 and that is the amount, when combined with all my personal resources, that gets this project started at its minimum viable scale. My stretch goal - again, very sincerely - is one million dollars. This amount will ensure I do not have to go looking for funding in the future, it will get this project started at scale, it will do more good in the world sooner and, last but definitely not least, it will break the current Kickstarter funding record of $942,578.00. That is the amount that was pledged and paid by 13,512 backers for development of what looks to be a very well-engineered and well-built watch band that holds an iPod.

Please help me raise one million dollars - with your help, I know we can do it.

The Rewards

We will get pictures up of all of the rewards as they become available; some may be approximations of the final rewards (i.e. bad Photoshopping of labels onto product photos sent by suppliers). The 2 oz seasoning will come in a standard spice jar but we can't decide if we want glass or metal (think jar of oregano vs tin of paprika) - feel free to weigh in; research and choosing will conclude soon.

For the hot sauce (and commemorative) bottles, we are looking at around 5 liquid oz +/-  (whereas you are looking at the bad Photoshopping mentioned above) - you can think of this as the standard US hot sauce bottle size.

 

The knife blade will either be Damascus steel or ceramic - it depends on what ends up being more indelibly imprintable when my knife maker finishes conducting his tests. For the rewards requiring personalization or coordination, we will be in touch with you to get your preferences.